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1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica: The History of Education
This page last revised:
November 2002
Copyright © 1997-2002 |
1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica
The History of Education
Greek Education
In all ages the claims of the individual and those of the community have
struggled for the mastery as the ultimate principles of life. As one or the other has
prevailed, the conception of education has emphasized social service or individual success
as the primary end. The true harmony of human life will only be attained when these two
impulses, contradictory on their own level, are united in a higher synthesis which sees
each as the complement of the other in a life whose purpose is neither simple egoism nor
pure altruism. Until that conception of life is attained and held generally there can be
no sure and universally accepted conception of the aim and function of education. Much of
the interest of the history of education turns on the relation of these two principles as
determinants of its aim.
In ancient Greece the supremacy of the state was generally unquestioned,
and, especially in the earlier times, the good man was identified with the good citizen.
No doubt, in education, and in later days philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, saw
clearly that the round of the duties of citizenship did not exhaust the life of the
individual. With them the highest life was one of cultured leisure in which energies were
mainly concentrated on the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. But this
“diagogic” life was only for the select few; for the undistinguished many the
fulfilment by each of the duties of his station remained the measure of worthy life,
though such duties were regarded as affecting the individual and private relations of the
citizens in a much more intimate way than in former and ruder ages. And for those who
devoted their lives to the highest culture, the essential preliminary condition was the
existence of such a state as would form the most favourable environment for their pursuits
and the most stable foundation for their leisured life. Thus Greek thought was saturated
with the conception of life as essentially a set of relations between the individual and
the city-state of which he formed an integral part. The first aim of education was
therefore to train the young as citizens.
This training must, of necessity, be of a specific kind; for, like other
small communities, the Greek city-states showed a life fundamentally one in conception,
under various specific forms. Each state had its special character, and to this character
the education given in it must conform if it were to be an effective instrument for
training the citizens. From these fundamental conceptions flowed the demands of Plato and
Aristotle that education should be regulated in all its details by the state authority,
should be compulsory on all free citizens, and should be uniform -- at any rate in its
earlier stages -- for all. In the Republic and the Laws, Plato shows to what
extreme lengths theory may go when it neglects to take account of some of the most
pertinent facts of life. For the guardian-citizens of the ideal state family life and
family ties are abolished; no lower community is to be allowed to enter into competition
with the state. Aristotle, indeed, did not go to these extreme lengths; he allowed the
family to remain, but he seems to have regarded it as likely to affect children more for
evil than for good.
In the essential principles laid down by both philosophers as to the
relation of the state to education, and in the corollaries they drew from that relation,
they were not at variance with the accepted Greek theory on the subject. It is true that
the actual practice of Greek states departed, and often widely, from this ideal, for,
especially in later centuries, the Greek always tended to live his own life. The nearest
approach to the theory was found in Sparta, where the end of the state as a military
organization was kept steadily in view, and where, after early childhood, the young
citizens were trained directly by the state in a kind of barrack life -- the boys to
become warriors, the girls the mothers of warriors. It was this feature of Spartan
education, together with the rude simplicity of life it enforced, which attracted Plato,
and, to a less extent, Aristotle. In Athens there had of old been state laws insisting on
the attendance of the children of the free citizens at school, and, in some degree,
regulating the schools themselves. But at the time of Plato these had fallen into
desuetude, and the state directly concerned itself only with the training of the ephebi,
for which, we learn from Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, somewhat
elaborate provisions were made by the appointment of officers, and the regulation of both
intellectual and physical pursuits. For children and youths under the phebic age there was
no practical regulation of schools or palaestra by the state. Yet there is no doubt that
the education really given was in conformity with Athenian ideals of culture and life, and
that it was generally received by the children of free citizens, though of course the sons
of the wealthy, then as now, could and did continue their attendance at school to a later
age than their poorer brethren. The education of girls was essentially a domestic
training. What Plato and Aristotle, with the theorist’s love of official systematic
regulation, regarded as the greatest defect of Athenian education was in reality its
strongest point. In practice, the harmony between individual liberty and social claims was
much more nearly attained under a system of free working out of common thoughts and ideals
that would have been the case under one of irresistible imposition from without of a rigid
mould.
The instruments of education everywhere found to be in harmony with the
Greek conception of life and culture were essentially twofold -- music, or literary and
artistic culture, for the mind, and systematic gymnastic for the body. Plato, in the Republic,
shows that the latter, as well as the former, affects the character, and doubtless, though
not formulated, this was generally more or less vaguely felt. But Greek gymnastic was
really an individual training, and therefore made only indirectly for the aim of
cultivating the social bonds of citizenship. Ancient Greece had nothing corresponding in
value in this respect to the organized games which form so important a feature in the
school life of modern England. The musical training was essentially in the national
literature and music of Greece, and this could obviously be carried to very different
lengths. The elements of mathematical science were also commonly taught. The essential
purpose throughout was the development of the character of a loyal citizen of Athens. As
Athenian culture advanced, increasing attention was paid to diagogic studies, especially
in the ephebic age, with a corresponding decrease of attention to merely physical
pursuits; hence the complaints of such satirists as Aristophanes of a growing luxury,
effeminacy and corruption of youths: complaints apparently based on a comparison of the
worst features of the actual present with an idealized and imaginative picture of the
virtues of the past. Such comparison is, indeed, implicit in much of Plato and Aristotle
as well as in Aristophanes.
But a disintegrating force was already at work in the educational system
of Greece which Plato and Aristotle vainly opposed. This was the rhetorical training of
the Sophists, the narrowly practical and individualistic aim of which was entirely out of
harmony with the older Greek ideals of life and culture. In a democratic city-state the
orator easily became a demagogue, and generally oratory was the readiest path to influence
and power. Thus oratory opened the way to personal ambition, and young men who were moved
by that passion eagerly attended the Sophist schools where their dominant motive was
strengthened.
Further, the closer relations between the Greek states, both in nearer and
farther Hellas, led naturally to the diminution of differences between civic ideals, and,
as a consequence, to a more cosmopolitan conception of higher education. This process was
completed by the loss of political independence of the city-states under the Macedonian
domination. Henceforth, higher education became purely intellectual, and its relation to
political and social life increasingly remote. This, combined with the growing rhetorical
tendency already noticed, accounts for the sterility of Greek thought during the
succeeding centuries. The means of higher education were, indeed, more fully organized.
The university of Athens was the outcome of a fusion of the private philosophical schools
with the state organization for the training of the ephebi, and there were other such
centres of higher culture, especially in after years at Alexandria, where the contact of
Greek thought with the religions and philosophies of Egypt and the East gave birth in time
to the more or less mystical philosophies which culminated in neo-platonism. But at Athens
itself thought became more and more sterile, and education more and more a mere training
in unreal rhetoric, till the dissolution of the university by Justinian in AD. 529.
Roman Education
Thus when Rome conquered Greece, Greek education had lost that reality
which is drawn from intimate relation to civic life, and the fashionable individualistic
schools of philosophy could do nothing to replace the loss. It was, then, an education
which had largely lost its life-springs that was transferred to Rome. In the earlier
centuries of the republic, Roman education was given entirely in family and public life.
The father had unlimited power over his son’s life, and was open to public censure if
he failed to train him in the ordinary moral, civic and religious duties. But it is
doubtful if there were any schools, and it is certain there was no national literature to
furnish an instrument of culture. A Roman boy learnt to reverence the gods, to read, to
bear himself well in manly exercises, and to know enough of the laws of his country to
regulate his conduct. This last he acquired directly by hearing his father decide the
cases of his clients every morning in his hall. The rules of courtesy he learnt similarly
by accompanying his father to the social gatherings to which he was invited. Thus easly
Roman education was essentially practical, civic and moral, but its intellectual outlook
was extremely narrow.
When a wider culture was imported from Greece it was, however, the form
rather than the spirit of true Hellenic education that was transferred. This was, indeed,
to some extent inevitable from the decadent state of Greek Hellenized education at the
time, but it was accentuated by the essentially practical character of the Roman mind.
The instrument of education first introduced was Greek literature, much of
which was soon translated into Latin. In time the schools of the grammatic, teaching
grammar and literature, were supplemented by schools of rhetoric and philosophy, though
the philosophy taught in them was itself little more than rhetorical declamation. These
furnished the means of higher culture for those youths who did not study at Alexandria or
Athens, and were also preparatory to studies at those universities. Under the Empire the
rhetorical schools were gradually organized into a state system, the general principles of
administration being laid down by imperial decree, and even such details as the
appointment and rate of payment of the professors, at first left to the municipalities,
being in time assumed by the central government. There is no evidence of any state
regulation or support of the lower schools. This widening of culture affected both boys
and girls, the domestic education of the latter being supplemented by a study of
literature. But it is the higher training in rhetoric which is especially characteristic
of Hellenized Roman education.
The conception of a rhetorical culture is seen at its best in
Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, the most systematic treatise on education
produced by the ancient world. With Quintilian, the ideal of an orator was a widely
cultured, wise and honourable man. And at first the teaching of rhetoric undoubtedly made
for higher and true culture. But with the autocracy, soon passing into tyranny, of the
empire, rhetoric ceased to be a preparation for real life. The true function of oratory is
to persuade a free people. When it cannot be applied to this purpose it becomes little
more than a means of intellectual frivolity, or, at the best, an exhibition of cultured
ingenuity. Under the empire a rhetorical training was, indeed, turned in not a few
instances to practical but most unworthy uses by the delators; a result made possible by
the legal system which rewarded delation with a considerable portion of the estate of the
condemned. Even apart from this, the education in rhetoric had an increasingly evil effect
both on the culture and on the character of the higher classes in the Roman empire. Out of
real connexion with life as it was, it sought its subjects in the realms of the fanciful
and the trivial, and with unreality of topic went of necessity deterioration of style. The
vivid presentment of living thought gave way to that inflated and bombastic abuse of
meretricious ornament and far-fetched metaphor in which human speech is always involved
when it sets forth ideas, or shadows of ideas, which grow out of no conviction in the
speaker and are expected to carry no conviction to the hearer. Imitation of the form of
great models, without the substance of thought which underlay them, led to a general
unreality and essential falseness of mental life. Further, the continual gazing with
admiration on the productions of the past, and the conception of excellence as consisting
in closeness of imitation, induced a servile attitude of mind towards authority in all too
close agreement with the political servility which marked the Roman court. Such an
attitude was essentially hostile to mental initiative, and thus rhetoric became not merely
an art of expression but a type of character.
Nor was there anything in the general conditions of society to
counterbalance the ill effects of school and university education. Quintilian lamented
that, even in his time, the old Roman family education by example was corrupted; and the
moral degradation of later times, though it has doubtless been exaggerated, was certainly
real and widespread. Nor does the religious revival of Paganism which synchronized with
the early centuries of Christianity appear to have effected any reform in life.
Alexandria, the birthplace of neo-platonism and the intellectual centre of the later
empire, was also a very sink of moral obliquity.
Christianity and Education
It was into such a decaying civilization, which by its want of vitality
sterilized education, oppressing it under the weight of a dead tradition, that
Christianity brought new life. Of course, careful instruction in the Faith was given in
catechetical schools, of which that at Alexandria was the most famous. But the question as
to the attitude of Christians towards the ordinary classical culture was important. On the
one hand, literature was saturated with Paganism, and the Pagan festivals formed a regular
part of school life. On the other hand, the Pagan education offered the only means of
higher culture, and thus furnished the only weapon with which Christians could
successfully meet their controversial antagonists. Quite at first, no doubt, when the
converts to the new faith were few and obscure, the question scarcely arose; but as men of
culture and position were attracted to the Church it became urgent. The answers given by
the Christian leaders were various, and largely the outcome of temperament and previous
training. The Greek Fathers, especially Clement of Alexandria (150-217) and Origen
(185-253), regarded Christianity as essentially the culmination of philosophy, to which
the way must be found through liberal culture. Without a liberal education the Christian
could live a life of faith and obedience but could not attain an intellectual
understanding of the mysteries of the Faith. On the other hand, Tertullian (160-240) was
very suspicious of Pagan culture; though he granted the necessity of employing it as a
means of education, yet he did so with regret, and would forbid Christians to teach it in
the public schools, where some recognition of Paganism would be implied. The general
practice of the Christians, however, did not conform to Tertullian’s exhortations.
Indeed, many of the cultivated Christians of the 3rd and 4th centuries were little more
than nominal adherents to the Faith, and the intercourse between Christian and Pagan was
often close and friendly. The general attitude of Christians towards the traditional
education is evidenced by the protest raised against the edict of Julian, which forbade
them to teach in the public schools. The ultimate outcome seems to be fairly expressed in
the writings of St Augustine (354-430) and St Jerome (346-420), who held that literary and
rhetorical culture is good so long as it is kept subservient to the Christian life.
In another way Greek philosophy exercised an abiding influence over the
culture of future ages. The early centuries of Christianity felt the need of formulating
the Faith to preserve it from disintegration into a mass of fluid opinions, and such
formulation was of necessity made under the influence of the philosophy in which the early
Fathers had been trained-that Neo-platonism which was the last effort of Paganism to
attain a conception of life and of God. In the West, this formulation had to be translated
into Latin, for Greek was no longer generally understood in Italy, and thus the juristic
trend of Roman thought also became a factor in the exposition of Christian doctrine. This
formulation of the Faith was one of the chief legacies the transition centuries passed on
to the Middle Ages.
Had classical culture been less formal than it was during the early
centuries of Christianity, the innate antagonism of the Pagan and Christian views of life
and character must have been so apparent that the education which prepared for the one
could not have been accepted by the other. It was only because rhetorical culture was so
emphatically intellectual, and so little, if at all, moral in its aims, that its inherent
opposition to the Christian conception of character was not obvious. That its antagonistic
influence was not inoperative is shown by the not infrequent perversions of cultured
Christians to Paganism. But generally the opposition was so obscured that the ethical
writings of St Ambrose (340-397) are largely Stoic in conception and reasoning. Yet the
Pagan ideal of life, especially as it had been developed in the individualistic ethics
which had prevailed for more than six centuries, was antithetical in essence to that of
the Christian Church. The former was essentially an ethics of self-reliance and
self-control showing itself in moderatiOn and proportion in all expressions of life. An
essential feature in such a character was high-mindedness and a self-respect which was of
the nature of pride. On the contrary, Christian teaching exalted humility as one of the
highest virtues, and regarded pride and self-confidence as the deadliest of sins. It
recognized no doctrine of limitation; what was to be condemned could not be abhorred too
violently, nor could what was good be too strongly desired or too ardently sought. The
highest state attainable by man was absorption in loving ecstasy in the mystic
contemplation of God. The practical attempt to realize this gave rise to monasticism, with
its minutely regulated life expressing unlimited obedience and the renunciation of private
will at every moment. The monastic life was regarded as the nearest approach to the ideal
which a Christian could make on earth. Naturally, as this conception gathered strength in
generations nurtured in it, the value of classical culture became less and less apparent,
and by the time of St Gregory the Great (d. 604) the use of classical literature except as
means of an education having quite another end than classical culture was discouraged.
Of course, during these centuries, the gradual subjugation of the western
empire by the barbarians had been powerfully operative in the obscuring of culture. Most
of the public schools disappeared, and generally the light of learning was kept burning
only in monasteries, and in barbarian times, more and more faintly as they became less
isolated units exposed to attack by ruthless foes or living in continual dread of such
attack. Though the barbarians absorbed the old culture in various degrees of imperfection,
yet the four centuries following the death of St Augustine were plunged in intellectual
darkness, relieved by transitory gleams of light in Britain and by a more enduring flame
in Ireland. The utmost that could be done was to preserve to some extent the heritage of
the past. This, indeed, was essentially the work of men like Boethius, Cassiodorus,
Isidore and Bede.
During these same centuries another process had been advancing with
accelerating steps. This was the modification of the Latin language. In the early
centuries of Christianity, literary Latin was already very different from colloquial
Latin, especially in the provinces; and, as has been said, the literary output of the last
age of Paganism was marked by sterility of thought and meretricious redundancy of
expression. On the other hand, the writings of Christianity show a real living force
seeking to find appropriate expression in new forms. Thus, with Christian writers, slavish
imitation of the past gradually gave way to the evolution of a new and living Latin, which
showed itself more and more regardless of classical models. To express the new ideas to
which Christianity gave birth, fresh words were coined, or borrowed from colloquial speech
or from the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. This Christian Latin was a real living instrument
of expression, which conformed itself in its structure much more closely to the mode of
thought and expression of actual life than did the artificial imitation of antiquity in
which the literary productions of Paganism were clothed. It is the Latin in which St
Jerome wrote the Vulgate. But with the obscuring of culture during the barbarian invasions
this current Latin became more and more oblivious of even such elements of form as
grammatical inflexions and concords.
Medieval Education
It was to the reformation of this corrupt Latin by a return to classical
models, and to the more general spread of culture, especially among clergy and nobles,
that the Carolingian revival addressed itself. The movement was essentially practical and
conservative. Alcuin (735-804), who was Charlemagne’s educational adviser and chief
executive officer in scholastic matters, was probably the best scholar of his time, and
himself loved the classical writings with which he was acquainted; but the text-books he
wrote were but imperfect summaries of existing compendia, and the intellectual condition
of his pupils forbade a very generous literary diet even had he thought it desirable, of
which there is some doubt. The most valuable outcome of the movement was the establishment
of the palace school, and of bishops’ schools and monastic schools throughout the
empire. Of these the latter were the most important, and each of the chief monasteries had
from the time of Charlemagne an external school for pupils not proposing to enter the
order as well as an internal school for novices. Thus, the educational system north of the
Alps was pre-eminently ecclesiastical in its organization and profoundly religious in its
aims. For two centuries the new intellectual life was obscured by the troubled times which
followed the death of Charlemagne, but the learning which the Carolingian revival had
restored was preserved here and there in cathedral and monastic schools, and the sequence
of well-educated ecclesiastics was never altogether interrupted.
The scope of that learning was comprised within the seven liberal arts and
philosophy, on the secular side, together with some dogmatic instruction in the doctrines
of the medieval Church, the early fathers, and the Scriptures. Theology was as yet not
organized into a philosophical system: that was the great work the Middle Ages had to
perform. The seven liberal arts (divided into the Trivium -- grammar, dialectic, rhetoric;
and the more advanced Quadrivium -- geometry, arithmetic, music, astronomy) were a legacy
from old Roman education through the transition centuries. They appear in the Disciplinaruin
libri IX. of Varro in the 2nd century B.C., where are added to them the more
utilitarian arts of medicine and architecture. But they reached the Middle Ages chiefly
through the summaries of writers in the transition centuries, of which the best known were
the De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii of the Neo-platonist Martianus Capella, who
wrote probably early in the 5th century; the De artibus ac disciplinis liberalium
litterarum of the Christian Cassiodorus (468-562); and the Etymologiarum libri XX.
of St Isidore of Seville (570-636).
The scope of the arts was wider than their names would suggest in modern
times. Under grammar was included the study of the content and form of literature; and in
practice the teaching varied from a liberal literary culture to a dry and perfunctory
study of just enough grammar to give some facility in the use of Latin. Dialectic was
mainly formal logic. Rhetoric covered the study of law, as well as composition in prose
and verse. Geometry was rather what is now understood by geography and natural history,
together with the medicinal properties of plants. Arithmetic, with the cumbrous Roman
notation, included little more than the simplest practical calculations required in
ordinary life and the computation of the calendar. Music embraced the rules of the
plain-song of the Church, some theory of sound, and the connexion of harmony and numbers.
Astronomy dealt with the courses of the heavenly bodies, and was seldom kept free from
astrology. In philosophy the current text-books were the consolatione philosophiae
of Boethius (470-524), an eclectic summary of pagan ethics from the standpoint of the
Christian view of life, and the same writer’s adapted translations of the Categories
and inter pretatione of Aristotle and of Porphyry’s Introduction to the
Categories.
It is evident that though such a scheme of studies might in practice,
during ages of intellectual stagnation and general ignorance, be arid in the extreme, it
was capable in time of revival of giving scope to the widest extension of culture. It was,
indeed, at once comprehensive and unified in conception, and well adapted to educate for
the perfectly definite and clear view of life which the Church set before men.
In the 11th century Europe had settled down, after centuries of war and
invasion, into a condition of comparative political stability, ecclesiastical discipline,
and social tranquility: the barbarians had been converted, and, as in revival, the case of
the Normans, had pressed to the forefront of civilization; civic life had developed in the
fortified towns of Italy, raised as defences against the pressure of Saracen and Hungarian
invasions. Soon, communication with the East by trade and in the Crusades, and with the
highly cultivated Moors in Spain, further stimulated the new burst of intellectual life.
Arabic renderings of some of the works of Aristotle and commentaries on them were
translated into Latin and exercised a profound influence on the trend of culture. A new
translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics appeared in 1167, and by the beginning
of the 13th century all his physical, metaphysical and ethical treatises were available,
and during the next half century the translations from Arabic versions were superseded by
renderings direct from the original Greek. As expositions of the real doctrines of
Aristotle the translations from the Arabic left much to be desired. Renan calls the
medieval edition of the Commentaries of Averroës “a Latin translation of a Hebrew
translation of a commentary made upon an Arabic translation of a Syriac translation of a
Greek text.” The study of such works often led to the enunciation of doctrines held
heretical by the theologians, and it was only when the real Aristotle was known that it
was found possible to bring the Peripatetic philosophy into the service of theology.
There were thus two broad stages in the educational revival commonly known
as scholasticism. In the first the controversies were essentially metaphysical, and
centred round the question of the nature of universals; the orthodox theological party
generally supporting realism, or the doctrine that the universal is the true reality, of
which particulars and individuals are only appearances; while the opposite doctrine of
nominalism -- that universals are “mere sounds” and particulars the only true
existences -- showed a continual disposition to lapse into heresies on the most
fundamental doctrines of the Church. The second stage was essentially constructive; the
opposition of philosophy to theology was negated, and philosophy gave a systematic form to
theology itself. The most characteristic figure of the former period was Abelard
(1079-1142), of the latter St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). The former knew little of
Aristotle beyond the translations and adaptations of Boethius, but he was essentially a
dialectician who applied his logic to investigating the fundamental doctrine of the Church
and bringing everything to the bar of reason. This innate rationalism appeared to bring
theology under the sway of philosophy, and led to frequent condemnations of his doctrines
as heretical. With St Thomas, on the other hand, the essential dogmas of Christianity must
be unquestioned. In his Summa theologiae he presents all the doctrines of the
Church systematized in a mould derived from the Aristotelian philosophy.
It is evident, then, that during the period of the scholastic revival,
men’s interests were specially occupied with questions concerning the spiritual and
the unseen, and that the great instrument of thought was syllogistic logic, by which
consequences were deduced from premises received as unquestionably true. There was a
general acceptance of the authority of the Church in matters of belief and conduct, and of
that of Aristotle, as approved by the Church, in all that related to knowledge of this
world.
Before the rediscovery of Aristotle exerted such a general influence on
the form of education, there was a real revival of classical literary culture at Chartres
and a few other schools, and John of Salisbury (d. 1182) in his Met ale gicus advocated
literature as an instrument of education, and lamented the barrenness of a training
confined to the subtleties of formal logic. But the recrudescence of Aristotle accelerated
the movement in favour of dialectic, though at the same time it furnished topics on which
Logic could be exercised which only a bare materialism can esteem unimportant. The
weaknesses of the general educational system which grew up within scholasticism were that
haste to begin dialectic led to an undue curtailment of previous liberal culture, and that
exclusive attention to philosophical and theological questions caused a neglect of the
study of the physical world and a disregard of the critical functions of the intellect.
Doubtless there were exceptions, of which perhaps the most striking is the work in
physical science done at Oxford by Roger Bacon (1214-1294). But Albertus Magnus
(1193-1280), the master of St Thomas, was also a student of nature and an authority for
his day on both the natural and the physical sciences. And the work of Grosseteste (d.
1253), as chancellor of the university of Oxford, shows that care for a liberal literary
culture was by no means unknown. Always there were such examples. But too often boys
hastened to enter upon dialectic and philosophy as soon as they had acquired sufficient
smattering of colloquial Latin to engage in the disputes of the schools. A deterioration
of Latin was the unavoidable consequence of such premature specialization. The seven
liberal arts were often not pursued in their entirety, and students remained satisfied
with desiccated compendia of accepted opinions. Thus the encyclopaedias of general
information which were in general use during the Middle Ages show little or no advance in
positive knowledge upon the treatment of similar subjects in Isidore of Seville.
The services of scholasticism to the cause of education, however, cannot
well be overestimated, and the content of the scholastic studies was in fundamental
harmony with the intellectual interests of the time. Above all other benefits owed by
future ages to scholasticism is the foundation of the universities of western Europe. The
intellectual activity of the 11th century led everywhere to a great increase in the number
of scholars attending the monastic and cathedral schools. Round famous teachers, such as
Abelard, gathered crowds of students from every country. In the 12th century the need for
organizing such bodies of teachers and students was imperative, and thus the earlier
universities arose in Italy, France and England, not by deliberate foundation of secular
or ecclesiastical ruler, but as spontaneous manifestations of the characteristic medieval
impulse to organize into institutions. Afterwards, charters conferring powers and
privileges were sought from both Church and state, but these only confirmed the self
governing character the universities had borne from the first. Each of the early
universities was a specialized school of higher study: Salerno was a school of medicine;
Bologna was the centre of that revival of Roman law which wrought so profound an effect
upon the legal systems of France and Germany towards the close of the medieval period. But
the greatest of medieval universities was that of Paris, emphatically the home of
philosophy and theology, which was the model upon which many other universities, including
Oxford and Cambridge, were organized.
The German universities were of later origin, the earliest being Prague
(1348) and Vienna (1365). They indicate the more recognized position the movement had
attained; for nearly all were founded by the civic authority, and then obtained the
recognition of the Church and charters from the emperor. The concentration of higher
instruction in universities was not antagonistic to the medieval conception of the Church
as the teacher of mankind. University life was modelled on that of the cloister, though
the monastic ideal could not be fully realized, and the scholars not infrequently
exhibited considerable licence in life. This was inevitable with the very large numbers of
the scholars and the great variations of age among them. Moreover students, and to a less
extent teachers, passed from university to university, so that the universities of
medieval Europe formed a free confederacy of learning in close relation to the Church but
untrammelled by state control. Nevertheless, they were less definitely ecclesiastical than
the cathedral seminaries which they largely supplanted, and the introduction of studies
derived from the Greeks through the Arabians led to an increased freedom of thought, at
first within authorized limits, but prepared, when occasion served, to transcend those
limits.
The scheme of instruction was arranged on the assumption that special
studies should he based on a wide general culture. Thus of the four faculties into which
university teaching was organized, that of arts, with its degrees of Baccalaureat and
Magister, was regarded as propaedeutic to those of theology, law and medicine. It often
included, indeed, quite young boys, for the distinction between grammar school and
university was not clearly drawn. Attention was concentrated on those subjects which treat
of man and his relations to his fellow-men and to God, and no attempt was made to extend
the bounds of knowledge. The aim was to pass on a body of acquired knowledge regarded as
embracing all that was possible of attainment, and the authority of Aristotle in physics
as well as in philosophy, and of Galen and Hippocrates in medicine was absolute. The
methods of instruction -- by lecture, or commentary on received texts; and by disputation,
in which the scholars acquired dexterity in the use of the knowledge they had absorbed --
were in harmony with this conception, and were undoubtedly thoroughly well suited to the
requirements of an age in which the ideal of human thought was not discovery but order,
and in which knowledge was regarded as a set of established propositions, the work of
reason being to harmonize these propositions in subordination to the authoritative
doctrines of the Church.
Such an extension of the means of higher education as was given by the
universities was naturally accompanied by a corresponding increase in schools of lower
rank. Not only were there grammar schools at cathedral and collegiate churches, but many
others were founded in connexion with chantries, and by some of the many gilds into which
medieval middle-class life organized itself. The Dominican and Franciscan friars were
enthusiastic promoters of learning both in universities and in schools, and in the
Netherlands the Brethren of the Common Life, founded by Gerard Groote and approved by
Eugenius IV in 1431, regarded school teaching as one of their main functions, and the
promotion of learning by the multiplication of manuscripts as another. The curriculum was
represented broadly by the trivium. The greatest attention was paid to grammar,
which included very various amounts of reading of classical and Christian authors, the
most commonly included being Virgil, parts of Ovid and Cicero, and Boethius. The textbooks
in grammar were the elementary catechism on the eight parts of speech by Donatus, a Roman
of the 4th century, said to have been the tutor of St Jerome, and the more advanced
treatise of Priscian, a schoolmaster of Constantinople about A.D. 500, which remained the
standard text-book for over a thousand years. In rhetoric Cicero’s De oratore
was read, and dialectic was practised, as in the universities, by means of disputations.
In addition to the grammar schools were writing and song schools of an
elementary type, in which instruction was usually in the vernacular. Girls were taught in
women’s monasteries and in the home, and those of the upper classes at least very
generally learned to read, write and keep accounts, as well as fine needlework, household
duties and management, and such elementary surgery and medicine as served in cases of
slight daily accidents and illnesses. Even those boys and girls who did not receive formal
scholastic instruction were instructed orally by the parish priests in the doctrines and
duties of the Faith; while the pictures and statues with which the churches were adorned
aided the direct teaching of sermons and catechizing in giving a general knowledge of
Bible history and of the legends of the saints.
No doubt, in times of spiritual and intellectual lethargy, the practice
fell short of the theory; but on the whole it may be concluded that in medieval times the
provision for higher instruction was adequate to the demand, and that, relatively to the
culture of the time, the mass of the people were by no means sunk in brutish ignorance.
Indeed, especially when the paucity of books before the invention of printing is borne in
mind, the number of people who could read the vernacular, as evidenced by the demand for
books in the vulgar tongue as soon as printing made them available, is clear proof that
the latter part of the Middle Ages was by no means a time of general illiteracy.
Feudalism, the other characteristic aspect of medieval society, had also
its system of education, expressing its own view of life, and preparing for the adequate
performance of its duties. This was the training in chivalry given to pages and squires in
the halls and castles of the great. Hallam has well said: “There are, if I may so
say, three powerful spirits which have from time to time moved over the face of the
waters, and given a predominant impulse to the moral sentiments and energies of mankind.
These are the spirits of liberty, of religion, and of honour. It was the principal
business of chivalry to animate and cherish the last of these.” And this was not in
opposition to the spirit of religion which animated the scholastic education which went on
side by side with it. Throughout chivalry was sanctified by the offices of the Church. The
education of chivalry aimed at fitting the noble youth to be a worthy knight, a just and
wise master, and a prudent manager of an estate. Much was acquired by daily experience of
a knightly household, but in addition the page received direct instruction in reading and
writing; courtly amusements, such as chess and playing the lute, singing and making
verses; the rules and usages of courtesy; and the knightly conception of duty. As a squire
he practised more assiduously the knightly exercises of war and peace, and in the
management of large or small bodies of men be attained the capacity of command.
Education During the Renaissance and Reformation
With the unification of existing knowledge and the systematization of
theology the constructive work of scholasticism was done. At the same time the growth of
national feeling was slowly but surely undermining feudalism. Moreover, deep resentment
was accumulating throughout western Europe against the practical abuses which had become
prevalent in the Church, and especially in the court of Rome and in the prince-bishoprics
of Germany. In short, Europe was out-growing medieval institutions, which appeared more
and more as empty forms unable to satisfy the needs and longings of the human soul. In
such conditions, the customary and traditional education of school and university tended
to lose touch more and more completely with the new aspirations and views of life which
were everywhere gathering adherents among the keenest and most active intellects. Had a
new cultural movement not begun, the education of Europe threatened to become as arid as
the rhetorical education of the last centuries of the Roman empire had been. From this it
was saved by the renaissance of classical studies which began in the 14th century.
Italy, by its greater wealth and its more intimate commerce with the
eastern empire, was the seed-plot of this new tree of knowledge. Ever since the 11th
century the cities of northern Italy had been in advance of Europe beyond the Alps both in
culture and in material progress. The old classical spirit and the feeling of Roman
citizenship had never quite died out, and the Divina Commedia of Dante (1265-1321)
furnishes evidence that the poet of the scholastic philosophical theology was also a keen
student and lover of the old Latin poets. But the greatest impulse to the revived study of
the classics was given by Petrarch (1304-1374) and Boccaccio (1313-1375). Generally
throughout western Europe the 14th century, though full of war and political unrest, was a
time of considerable intellectual activity, shown in the increase of schools and
universities, as well as in the literary and artistic revival in Italy, in the social and
theological movement in England and Bohemia associated with the names of Wycliffe and
Huss, and in the more or less perfect substitution of Roman law everywhere except in
England for the law of custom which had hitherto prevailed.
But it was the literary movement which most affected education, and indeed
the whole life of Europe. A decisive step was taken when Manuel Chrysoloras was invited to
teach Greek in the university of Florence in 1397. The enthusiasm for classical culture,
to which Petrarch had given so great an impetus, gathered force and extended over the
whole of Italy, though, of course, felt only by a select few and leaving the mass of the
people little, if at all, affected. From Italy it spread gradually to countries north of
the Alps. In the old writers men found full expression of that new spirit of
self-conscious freedom which was vaguely striving for expression throughout the whole of
Christendom. In the free political atmosphere of the Italian communes, with their wealthy
and leisured merchant class, that spirit could flourish much more readily than in the
feudalized Europe across the Alps. Moreover, the antique spirit was in direct line of
ancestry with that of medieval Italy. Thus, for a couple of centuries, Italy stood in the
van of European culture.
The stages of the movement cannot be traced here: suffice it to say it
showed itself especially in an enthusiastic search for manuscripts, followed by their
multiplication and wider distribution; in an intense devotion to literary form; in a
revival of classic taste in architecture; in a wonderful development of painting and
sculpture from symbolism of spiritual qualities towards naturalism and romanticism; in a
return to Platonism in philosophy; in a contempt, often unreasoning and wanting a
foundation in knowledge, for the scholastic Aristotelian philosophy itself, and not simply
for the trivialities into which its actual exercise had so commonly degenerated. The
invention of printing necessarily gave the movement both a stronger and a wider influence
than it could otherwise have attained. And in its search after knowledge it was in full
harmony with the spirit of adventure which marked the age, and by the discovery of the New
World wrought so profound a change in the relative importance and prosperity of the
countries of western Europe.
It is the spirit of the movement which is of interest to the student of
education. And that spirit was essentially one of opposition to authority and of assertion
of individual influence and liberty, which worked itself out in various forms among
peoples of different temperaments. In Italy, Renaissance form was literary and artistic,
and the full development of the Renaissance spirit was seen in a practical Paganism which
substituted the attractions of art for the claims of religion and morality, and eventuated
in deep and widespread immorality and a contemptuous tolerance of the outward observances
of religion without faith in the doctrines they symbolized. The movement became an attempt
to reconstitute the past intellectual life of Italy, and, as such, was foredoomed to
sterility as soon as the work of rediscovery was completed; for the revived forms were not
inspired with the vital spirit which had once made them realities, and consequently
men’s minds once again were occupied with mere verbal subtleties. The really valuable
service of the Italian humanists to Europe was the restoration to man of the heritage of
knowledge which he had allowed to slip from his grasp, and leading the way to a freer
intellectual atmosphere. In Germany the spirit manifested itself in a rebellion against
the doctrinal system of the Church as the only effectual means of attaining reform of
ecclesiastical abuses. The Protestant reformation of Luther was the real German outcome of
the Renaissance. In no other country of Europe did the movement take so distinctive a
form.
It was, then, not merely the revival of interest in classical studies
which so profoundly affected the life and education of western Europe. It was rather that
in those literatures men found a response to intellectual and moral cravings which had
been blindly gathering force for generations, and which found themselves formulated and
objectified in the writings which set forth the Pagan view of life with its assumption of
the essential worth and self-reliance of the individual and its frank delight in all the
pleasures of existence. It was, in short, in proportion as men not only found delight in
Pagan literature but returned in essence to the Pagan view of individual worth and the
supremacy of the human intellect, that the Church realized the danger to herself which
lurked in the new movement.
At first the revival of interest in the classical literatures did not show
any antagonism to Catholic faith and practice, and its warmest supporters were faithful
sons of the Church. The view of the relation of classical literature to Christianity
adopted by the great humanist schoolmaster Vittorino da Feltre (1378-1446) was broadly
that of the early Fathers, and in his school at Mantua he showed that culture was not
inconsistent with loyalty to the Church or with purity of life. With him classical
literature was not the end and sum of education, but was a means of implanting ideas, of
developing taste, and of acquiring knowledge, all as helps and ornaments of a Christian
life. Though Pagan literature was the means of education, the Pagan spirit had not
supplanted that of Christianity. The school at Mantua may, indeed, be said to have
exhibited in practice a Christianized application of the doctrines of Quintilian and
Plutarch.
So was it in the other countries of Christendom. In the Netherlands the
Brethren of the Common Life introduced humanistic studies into their schools side by side
with definite religious teaching and observances and their work was always dominated by
the Christian spirit. The earlier German humanists, such as Nicholas de Cusa, Hegius,
Agricola and Wimpheling, adopted the same attitude, and Erasmus himself, bitterly as he
attacked the practical abuses of the Church, remained in communion with it, and aimed at
harmonizing classical culture with the Christian life. In England the same love of culture
combined with devotion to the Church was seen in Selling, prior of Christ Church,
Canterbury, the first real English humanist, in Grocyn, More, Fisher, Colet and many
others whose enthusiasm for culture was as undoubted as was their loyalty to Catholicism.
It seemed, then, at first as if the greatest educational effect of the classical revival
would be the deepening of literary culture, and the substitution of real inquiry for
dialectic subtleties in the courses of schools and universities, without any break with
established religious teaching. It is true that the majority of schools were but little
affected, and many of the universities had given but a half-hearted welcome to humanistic
studies when the religious revolt in Germany under the leadership of Luther threw the
whole of Europe into two hostile camps. But even the conservative university of Paris --
the headquarters of scholastic philosophical theology -- had permitted the teaching of
Greek as early as 1458, and both Oxford and Cambridge had welcomed the new studies. That
the influence of the new movement for classical study was gradually permeating the schools
is shown not only by the practice of the Brethren of the Common Life but by the curriculum
laid down by the statutes of the schools refounded by Wolsey at Ipswich and by Colet at St
Paul’s.
The immediate effect of the religious controversies of the 16th century on
education was emphatically, if unintentionally, disastrous. The secularization of
ecclesiastical property too often absorbed the endowments of the schools, so that, both in
Germany and in England, the majority of grammar schools either disappeared or continued in
a starved existence with diminished funds; the doctrine of salvation by faith alone and
the futility of good works dried up the source from which such endowments had flowed; the
violent fulminations of the German reformers against the universities as the homes of the
hated scholastic theology and philosophy found an echo in minds fired with the Renaissance
enthusiasm for poetry and oratory, and correlative distaste for the more severe and
abstract speculations of logic and philosophy, which expressed itself in abstention from
those seats of learning; the preoccupation of men’s minds with theological
speculations and quarrels led those few who did resort to the universities to neglect
their appointed studies and to devote their energies to interminable wrangling over the
points in dispute.
This decadence in culture was attended by an outbreak of licence and
immorality, especially among the young, which called forth violent denunciations from
Luther and many of his followers in Germany, and from Latimer and other reformers in
England. In some respects these results were only transitory. Humanism and Protestantism,
which had so far diverged that Erasmus (1467-1536) had declared that where Lutheranism
flourished learning decayed, were brought together again by Melanchthon (1497-1560) under
whose influence universities were founded or reorganized and schools re-established in
Protestant German states; and in England the reign of Elizabeth saw many new educational
foundations. But this restoration of the means of education was only partial, and the
doctrine of the worthlessness of carnal knowledge, which led the Barebones Parliament to
propose the suppression of the English universities, was held by many fervent Protestants
both in England and in Germany all through the 17th century.
Moreover, the schools established a tradition of curriculum and
instruction which ignored the new directions of men’s thoughts and the new view of
knowledge as something to be enlarged, and not merely a deposit to be handed down from
generation to generation. The later humanist theories of education, which the schools
continued to follow generally for over two centuries, and in many cases for another
hundred years after that, were drawn mainly from Erasmus and Melanchthon, who found in the
classical languages and literatures, and especially in Latin, the only essential
instruments of education. General knowledge of natural facts might be desirable to the
cultured man as ornaments to his rhetoric, but it was to be sought in the writings of
antiquity. Even so revolutionary a thinker on education as Rabelais (1495-1553) with all
his demand for an encyclopaedic curriculum, held the writings of the ancients as
authoritative on natural phenomena. Melanchthon, whose conception of instruction was much
narrower, exercised enormous influence in the moulding of Protestant universities and
secondary schools, both directly and through such disciples as Trotzendorf and Neander,
but especially through his friend Sturm (1507-1589), whose Latin gymnasium at Strassburg
became the model which the grammar schools of Protestant Europe strove to imitate. In this
school nearly the whole of the energies of the boys was given to acquiring a mastery of
the Latin language after the model of Cicero. Sturm, indeed, did not go to the extreme
length of the Ciceronians, opposed and satirized by Erasmus, who would allow no word or
construction which could not be found in the extant writings of their master, but a like
spirit dominated him.
In Catholic countries the Church retained control of education. The
practical reformation of abuses by the Council of Trent, and the energy and skill of the
Society of Jesus, founded by St Ignatius Loyola, in 1534, brought back most of south
Germany into the fold of the Church. Everywhere Catholic universities were mainly taught
by Jesuit fathers; and under their influence, scholasticism, purged from the excretions
which had degraded it, was restored, and continued to satisfy the longings of minds which
felt the need of an authoritative harmonizing of faith and knowledge. Everywhere the
society established schools, which, by their success in teaching and the mildness of their
discipline, attracted thousands of pupils who came even from Protestant homes. Their
curriculum was purely classical, but it was elaborated with much skill, and the methods of
instruction and discipline were made the subject of much thought and of long-continued
experiment. In the methods thus determined all Jesuit fathers were trained, so that the
teachers in Jesuit schools attained a degree of skill in their art which was too generally
wanting elsewhere.
So long as Latin remained the language of learning, and new fields of
knowledge were not appropriated, the schools remained in harmony with the culture of their
time, though, as Mulcaster (1530-161f) pointed out, such a training early was not of value
to the majority of boys. For them he urged an elementary education in the vernacular; but
neither in this nor in his advocacy of the training of teachers was his advice followed.
In the 17th century the dislocation between the Latin schools and the
needs of life began to be accentuated as Latin gradually ceased to be the language of
learning; and, as a consequence, the numbers attending the schools decreased, and the mass
of the people sunk continual]y lower in ignorance. In vain Hoole urged the establishment
of a universal system of elementary schools giving instruction in the vernacular, Petty
put forth his plan for elementary trade schools, and Cowley proposed the establishment of
a college devoted to research. Ideas of reform were in the air, but the main current of
scholastic practice flowed on unaffected by them. Some attention was, indeed, paid to the
conservative reforms advocated by the Port Royalists, of which the most important was the
inclusion of the vernacular as a branch of instruction, but the cry for more fundamental
changes based on the philosophy of Bacon was unheeded. Of these, none was a more active
propagandist than Comenius (1571-1635). Unfortunately his Great Didactic, in which
he set forth his general principles, attracted little attention and won less adherence,
though his school books, in which he attempted with very little success to apply his
principles, were widely used in schools. But these were little more than bald summaries of
real and supposed facts, stated in Latin and the vernacular in parallel columns. In
content they differed from such medieval summaries of knowledge as the well-known work of
Bartholomew Anglicus, which had been widely used since the i3th century, chiefly by their
greater baldness and aridity of statement.
In the universities, too, the 16th and 17th centuries saw a continuous
decadence. The 16th century was not ripe for real intellectual freedom; and Protestantism,
having based its revolt on the right of private judgment, soon produced a number of
conflicting theological systems, vying with each other in rigidity and narrowness, which,
as Paulsen says, “nearly stifled the intellectual life of the German people.”
Further, the idea of national autonomy, which exercised so great an effect on the politics
of the time, included the universal adherence of the citizens to the religion of the
state. Hence, till the end of the 17th century the universities of Protestant Europe were
regarded mainly as instruments for securing adhesion to the national theological system on
the part of future clergy and officials, and the state interfered more and more with their
organization and work.
Theology occupied the most important place in the higher studies pursued,
which for the rest differed little in content and less in spirit from those of preceding
centuries, except that more attention was paid to the study of classical literature. Even
that decayed into formal linguistics as the Renaissance enthusiasm for poetry and oratory
died out, and interest in logical and philosophical questions, fostered by the dominance
of dogmatic controversial theology, again became dominant. In Paris, on the other hand,
the faculty of theology had decayed through the withdrawal of those preparing for the
priesthood into episcopal seminaries, and the higher studies pursued were mainly law and
medicine. Thus, generally, the universities were less and less fulfilling the function of
providing a general liberal education. Another change, due to the same causes and making
for the same results, was the isolation of universities, often directly fostered by the
state governments, which for the universal interchange of medieval thought substituted a
narrow provincial culture and outlook. It is no wonder that numbers everywhere decayed and
that complaints as to the habits of the students were loud and frequent.
At the close of the 17th century, then, universities as well as schools
had reached a very low level of efficiency and were held in little respect by the
cultured. Indeed, from the middle of the century, the main current of higher intellectual
life had drifted away from the orthodox classes, centres of learning. The formation of the
Berlin Academy in Germany and of the Royal Society in England, and the refusal of Leibnitz
to accept a chair in any German university, were signs of the times. In France, and later
in Germany, the education of the noble youth was increasingly carried on apart from the
schools, and was really an outgrowth from the education of chivalry. In the 16th century
Castiglione and Montaigne had advocated a training directly adapted to prepare for polite
life, and Elyot wrote on similar lines. But the most important movement in this direction
was the formation of the courtly academies which flourished in France in the 17th century,
and were soon imitated in the Ritterakademien of Germany. In these schools of the nobility
French was more honoured than classics, and the other subjects were chosen as directly
adapted to prepare for the life of a noble at the court. Milton in his Tract advocated the
foundation of such academies in England, though he proposed a curriculum far more
extensive than had ever been found possible. More and more, too, foreign travel had, from
the middle of the 16th century, been looked upon as a better mode of finishing the
education of a gentleman than a course at a university.
Modern Education
The later years of the 17th century saw a revival of university life in
Cambridge, through the work of Newton and the increasing attention paid to mathematics and
the physical revival of university sciences, though the number of students continued very
small. In Germany, also, a new era opened with the foundation of the universities of Halle
(1694) and Gottingen (1737), which from the first discarded the old conception that the
function of a university is to pass on knowledge already complete, and so opened the door
of the German universities to the new culture and philosophy. It was soon seen that
students could thus be attracted, and the influence spread to the other German
universities, which by the end of the 18th century had regained their position as homes of
the highest German thought.
At Halle, too, was set the example by Francke of providing for the
education of the children of the poor, and to his disciple Hecker Germany owes the first
Realschulen. Simultaneous movements for the education of the poor were made by St
Jean-Baptiste de la Salle and the Brothers of the Christian Schools in France, and by the
Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge in England. But the total results were
not great; the mass of the people in every European country remained without schooling
throughout the 18th century.
The intellectual movements of that century were, indeed, essentially
aristocratic. Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists aimed at the enlightenment of the select
few, and Rousseau declared baldly that the poor need no education. That these movements
influenced education profoundly is undoubted. The individualistic and abstract thought:
rationalism of Voltaire, derived from the sensationist philosophy of Locke through the
more thorough-going Condillac, and finding its logical outcome in the materialistic
atheism of La Mettrie and the refined selfishness of Rochefoucault, infected the more
cultured classes. In Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his son is shown its educational
outcome -- a veneer of superficial culture and artificial politeness covering, but not
hiding, the most cold-blooded selfishness. Against this fashionable artificiality, as well
as against the obvious social and political abuses of the time, Rousseau’s call for a
return to nature was a needed protest.
Rousseauism, however, was not merely a transitory revolt against a
conventionality of life that had become unbearable; it was emphatically the voicing of a
view of life and of education which has profoundly influenced Europe ever since. In that
Rousseau (1712-1778) attempted to look at life as a whole he was on truer ground than were
the intellectualists of the “Enlightenment”; but in that he found the essence of
life in the gratification of the desires and impulses of the moment, he enunciated a
doctrine which banished high principle and strenuous effort from life and consequently
from education. In the Emile is presented a purely fantastic scheme of education
based on a psychology of development so crude as to be absolutely false, and producing a
young man utterly unable to guide his own life or to control his emotions and impulses.
Rousseauism is, indeed, in its essence the application to education of the doctrines of
naturalism -- the philosophy which regards human life as a mere continuation of physical
process, and consequently as determined wholly by environment. So Rousseau would abolish
all moral training and leave the child to the reactions of the physical world upon his
actions.
Against this position the educational teaching of Kant (1724- 1804),
influenced though he was by the Emile, is essentially a protest. The most necessary
element in education, according to Kant, is constraint, which by the formation of habit
prepares the young to receive as principles of conduct the laws at first imposed upon them
from without. And the supreme guide of life is the law of duty which is always more or
less opposed to the promptings of inclination. Kant exaggerates the dualism: Rousseau
would abolish it by ignoring the more important of the two antitheses.
The French Revolution -- the natural outcome of the teachings of Voltaire
and of Rousseau -- was the second stage in the movement of which the Reformation was the
first. It was essentially the assertion of the natural rights of man, and, as a logical
sequence, of the right of every child to be properly trained for life. The reaction due to
the excesses of the revolutionists no doubt delayed the acknowledgment for a time, but its
gradual recognition is emphatically the characteristic mark of the educational history of
the 19th century.
Preached and practised by Pestalozzi (1746-1827) in Switzerland, the
general education of the poor was first made a reality by Prussia after the crushing
defeat of Jena. In France and England. education remained for nearly three-quarters of the
century the work of the Church and other voluntary agencies, though aided by the state.
Finally a state system of schools has been more or less fully set up in every state of
western Europe and in America, and subjected to more or less state regulation and control.
Equally marked has been the growing care for the scholastic education of girls as well as
boys, though only in America are the two regarded as practically identical in form and
content.
Thus the 19th century saw the final working out of the idea that the state
should be substituted for the Church as the official agent of education, an idea which had
its roots in the Renaissance conception of the right of man to direct his life apart from
theological determinations. The more direct outcome of the same idea is apparent in the
absolute liberty with which the presuppositions of knowledge are questioned, and the maxim
of Descartes -- to prove everything by the reason and to accept nothing which fails to
stand the test -- is acted upon. No greater contrast is possible than that between the
medieval student and the modern searcher after truth.
The influence of the same spirit has wrought an equally momentous change
in the methods of instruction. The impetus given by the exaggerated doctrine of Rousseau
to the Methods view that the nature of the child should determine the means of education,
led to more thorough-going attempts than had hitherto been made to base educational method
on a knowledge of child psychology. Pestalozzi and Froebel (1782-1852), by their
insistence on the need of educating a child through his own activity, and by their
widespread influence, made the new view of method an actuality. The influence of Rousseau
has, thus, passed into modern educational practice in a form that, in its essence, is
true, though in practice it has shown itself apt to run into the same excess of emphasis
on impulse and feeling which vitiated the teaching of Rousseau himself. The influence of
Herbart (1776-1841) has tended to counteract this. The essence of Herbartianism is that
mental life consists of presentations, or reactions of the mind on the environment, and
that will springs from the circle of thought thus developed. The emphasis is therefore
placed on intellect and instruction while in Froebelianism it is placed on spontaneous
activity and on the arrangement of the environment. Each exaggerates the function of the
one factor in concrete experience which it makes the centre of interest, and each is
tinged with the individualistic conception of life which characterized the 18th and early
19th century.
The most marked change in the outward aspect of education has been the
modification of the curriculum of school and university by the introduction of various
branches of natural science. Conjointly with this has been much increase of
specialization, and that not only in the university but in the school. There is no longer
a universally recognized circle of knowledge constituting a liberal education preparatory
to specialist studies, as there was in the Middle Ages. Nor is there general agreement as
to what such educational institutions as schools and universities should attempt to do, or
even as to the end that should be sought by education as a whole. Nor can agreement on
such points be expected while men differ widely as to the meaning and purpose of life. The
work of the organization of the material means of education has largely been accomplished
by the civilized world: that of determining the true theory and practice of the educative
process itself is still incomplete. To that, both discussion of the philosophy of life and
of the relative values in life, of various kinds of experience and experiment in the light
of the conclusions reached, are needed. The problem will never be absolutely solved, for
that would imply an absolutely best education irrespective of conditions, but its
practical solution will be reached when a true adjustment is made between the process of
education and the life ior which that education is intended to be a preparation.
 
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