CHAPTER XVII
THE NEW SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE SCHOOLS
THE RISE OF REALISM IN EDUCATION. As will be remembered from our study of the educational results of the Revival of Learning (chapter XI), the new schools established in the reaction against medievalism, to teach pure Latin and Greek, in time became formal and lifeless (p. 283), and their aim came to be almost entirely that of imparting a mastery of the Ciceronian style, both in writing and in speech. This idea, first clearly inaugurated by Sturm at Strassburg (R. 137), had now become fixed, and in its extreme is illustrated by the teachings of the Jesuit Campion at Prague (R. 146). As a reaction against this extreme position of the humanistic scholars there arose, during the sixteenth century, and as a further expression of the new critical spirit awakened by the Revival of Learning, a demand for a type of education which would make truth rather than beauty, and the realities of the life of the time rather than the beauties of a life of Roman days, the aim and purpose of education. This new spirit became known as Realism, was contemporaneous with the rise of scientific inquiry, and was an expression of a similar dissatisfaction with the learning of the time. As applied to education this new spirit may be said to have manifested itself in three different stages, as follows:
1. Humanistic realism. 2. Social realism. 3. Sense realism.
We will explain each of these, briefly, in order.