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Education and the Modernization of Austria in the Mid-nineteenth Century etween the 1790s and the early 1840s, Austria's social and politictures changed slowly compared with Western Europe. In the 1780s Emperor Joseph II abolished the legal status of serfdom, but.the great majority of Austrian peasants still had to render labor services or other feudal payments to manorial lords. In the early nineteenth century, modern textlle manufacture and metallurgy found footholds in Lower Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, and Vorarlberg, with some additional activity in Styria and Carinthia; but restrictive economic regulations and guild structures persisted in most towns. Traumatized by rebellions in the late 1780s and then by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the imperial authorities tried to maintain a centralized absolutist government. Empress Maria Theresa (ruled 174080 ) and her sonJoseph II (1780-90) had already reformed and streamlined the secondary schools and universities to meet the practical needs of government and society as they understood them. As will be seen, their successors continued nearly all the same basic regulations and policies for advanced education into the 1840s despite rising calls for reforms to meet the needs of a changing society. Only in response to the deep economic, social, and political crisis of the 1840s did the Austrian government begin to create a new system of advanced education comparable to those in neighboring Central· European states. Stagnation and Crisis, 1790-1848 Judged by any reasonable standard, Austrian secondary and higher education tended to .stagnate between the 1790s and the 1840s. Enrollments and the·numbers of institutions showed little or no growth, and by'the 1830s and 1840s o?servers complained about paralysis in many sectors of the educatiorial establishment. Population and the economy were growing in Austria, although not as rapidly as in parts of Western Europe·during this era.. The Austrian population increased by an average of 1.0 percent annually for the period between 1817 and 1845. The British population, in contrast,grew by an average J.3 percent annually between 1800 and 1850. Between 1830 and 1845, 1 1 12 CHAPTER ONE Austria's' industrial production expanded at an average per capita rate hetween1.8 percent and 2.6 percent per annum, depending on which index is used.1 Austria's systems of secondary and higher education, however, showed no clear tendency to expand or develop. The Habsburgs ' non-Hungarian crown lands had 79 Gymnasienin 1817 and, only 80 in 1847. The provinces with the most advanced economic development and the most important administrative centers had the highest density of Gymnasien per territory: in order, Silesia,. Bohemia, Lower Austria,and"Moravia. Total enrollments in the Austrian Gymnaslen fluctuated, with orily a marginal increase between the late 1820s and the mid-:-1840s: 19,.389 in 1828', down to 18,251 in 1838, and 21,246 in 1847.2 Realschulen made only a minor contribution to Austrian secondary education before the mid-nineteenth century. Austria's first such institution was founded in Vienna in 1809'to give greater emphasis than did the'Gymnasien to mathematics, physics, chemistry, and modern languages and help prepare future e"ngineers, technicians, and businessmen, Others followed in BrnO (Brunn) in 1811, Prague in 1833, and Graz in 1845. Ove~ time, "the Realschulen came to focus on preparing students for the technical institutes' in those cities and in several cases were attached to those institutes.3 The Austrian universities showed a stasis similar to that of the Gymnasien during the first half of the nineteenth century. Emperor Joseph II reduced the universities in Graz and Innsbruck to Lyzeen as part of efforts to achieve greater efficiency in state services, and no new universities were opened during the succeeding half century. When Salzburg passed to Austrian control at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Habsburg government retained only a small lyceum there; and it allowed the University of Olomouc (Olmutz) to decline' during the early nineteenth century.4 The universities ofVienna and Prague then were the only fully articulated universities of significance in the Alpine and Bohemian lands between 1815 and 1848. The Vienna and Prague universities experienced almost none of the curricular reforms and raising of scholarly standards that· invigorated university education-in northern.Gennany during the early nineteenth century. Between 1815 and 1848 the Austrian government made few reforms in any of the university curricula but medicine. Most of the. medical faculties offered only a two-year program focusing on basic surgery and obstetrics, and only the yienna medical faculty...

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