A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

542 Ch. 14 • The Industrial Revolution

train to transport a group of workers to a temperance meeting. Four years

later, he began the first travel agency, building on demand for his services at

the time of the Great Exposition of 1851 in London. Soon Cook was trans­

porting groups as far as classical ruins in Italy and Greece. Middle-class

families began to view travel as a means of self-improvement. They took in

museums and other sights. In London, the National Gallery first opened its

doors in 1824, about the same time as Berlin’s Old Museum.

Education

Secondary education increasingly provided a common cultural background
for the middle classes. Prussia’s secondary schools (Gymnasien, or high
schools) were arguably Europe’s finest, offering a varied curriculum that
included considerable religious instruction. In Britain, the victory of the
entrepreneurial ideal was reflected in a gradually changing secondary­
school curriculum. The English elite had long been exposed to a classical
curriculum, as well as to Spartan discipline featuring corporal punishment.
Reforms undertaken by Thomas Arnold (1795—1842), headmaster at Rugby
School, were intended to spur students on to better performances by stimu­
lating academic competition through examinations and prizes. Arnold’s
reforms reinvigorated the existing English “public”—in the United States
they would be considered private—secondary schools, and new ones were
established.

Many businessmen, however, still believed that experience was the best
preparation to carry the family torch. Prosperous French shopkeepers some­
times pulled their children out of school at age eleven or twelve, viewing
what they learned there as
irrelevant to the tasks that
lay ahead. Some entrepre­
neurs of family firms pre­
ferred to send sons to other
companies, sometimes even
in other countries, to obtain
practical experience.
Secularized education,
sponsored by states, only
slowly undermined the role
of religion in public life.
In France, the Chamber of
Deputies approved a law in
1833 (the Guizot Law,
named after the French
politician who sponsored it)
specifying that each village
The Reading Lesson, by Jean-Fran^ois Millet. was to have a primary