=Foundation of the Ministry of Education and Further Progress.=--While this comprehensive code met with much opposition from the clergy and the ignorant masses, and the next king, Frederick William III, weakly yielded at first, the humiliation of Prussia by Napoleon (1803) brought the country to a realization of the need of a centralized organization of the school system. The _Oberschulcollegium_ was abolished, to get rid of the clerical domination that had crept in, and a Bureau of Education was created as a section of the Department of the Interior in 1807. The Bureau was within a decade erected into a separate Department or Ministry of Education. Eight years later (1825) the state was divided into educational provinces; and a _Schulcollegium_, or administrative board, with considerable independence, but subject to the minister, was established over each province. Since then there have been many further developments, and provinces themselves are now divided into ‘governments,’ each of which has a ‘school commission’ over it, and every government is divided into ‘districts,’ whose chief officer is a ‘school inspector.’ Under the district inspector are local inspectors, and each separate school also has a local board, to take charge of repairs, supplies, and other external matters. Thus the supreme management of the schools has been gradually coming into the hands of the state for nearly two centuries. The decrees of 1717 and 1763, the establishment of the _Oberschulcollegium_ in 1787, the General Code promulgated in 1794, the foundation of a distinct civic administration of education in 1807, are the mile-stones that mark the way to state control. But, while the influence of the church has been constantly diminishing, many of the board members are ministers or priests and the inspectors come mostly from the clergy. Moreover, religious instruction forms part of the course in every school, although it is given at such an hour that any pupil may withdraw if the teaching is contrary to the faith in which he has been reared. The secondary schools are largely interdenominational, but in elementary education there are separate schools for Catholics and Protestants, alike supported by the state. [Sidenote: _Volksschulen_,] [Sidenote: ‘Continuation schools,’] [Sidenote: and _Mittelschulen_.]