To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany That They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools

Martin Luther published this open letter in Wittenberg in 1524, addressing it not to princes or bishops but to the town councils of the German cities. The occasion was an unintended consequence of his own movement. As monasteries emptied and the old clerical career path lost its appeal, parents stopped sending their children to the monastic and cathedral schools that had provided most formal education, and the schools themselves began to close. Luther had already written in To the Christian Nobility (1520) that universities needed reform; now he saw the whole structure of elementary and Latin schooling collapsing under the Reformation's weight, and he turned to the one institution he judged both capable and accountable enough to act.

The argument runs on two tracks, one urgent and one principled. The urgent track is a warning about a passing moment: God's word, Luther says, is like a shower of rain that does not return to the place it has once watered, and Germany has a brief window to secure the gospel before indifference closes it. The principled track is his case that education is a civic duty, not merely a parental or ecclesiastical one. Parents are often unable, unwilling, or too busy to teach; princes are occupied with other matters; therefore the councils, who already spend freely on walls, roads, bridges, and guns, must spend on the young. He grounds the need in languages. Hebrew and Greek are the sheath in which the sword of the Spirit is kept, and he argues from the errors of the church fathers that without them the Scriptures cannot be rightly handled and the gospel is eventually lost. He also insists that the commonwealth requires trained men for law and administration, not only pastors, and that girls as well as boys should be schooled, even if only for an hour or two a day, which he notes is far less time than children already spend at games and dice. He attacks the old schools as places of beating and bad Latin, proposes that each city build a library of Scripture, commentaries, grammars, histories, and poets, and holds up the Greeks and Romans as pagans who understood the value of educating their children better than present-day Christians.

The letter has endured because it is one of the founding documents of public education in the Protestant world, read by every generation that has argued over whether schooling is a private good or a public obligation. It also shows Luther at his most constructive, building rather than tearing down, and it preserves the Reformation's conviction that the study of languages is a matter of spiritual survival.

Who should read this: teachers, parents, and anyone shaping educational policy in a Christian setting, along with students of the Reformation who want to see what Luther thought a reformed society needed in order to last. It is not a devotional work, and readers seeking Luther on justification or the inner life should look elsewhere.