The History of Education / Educational Practice and Progress Considered as a Phase of the Development and Spread of Western Civilization

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. In what way was the fact that Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in Italian instead of Latin an evidence of large independence?

2. Was it a good thing for peace and civilization that the modern languages arose, instead of all speaking and writing Latin? Why?

3. Of what value to one is a "sense of the past behind him, and a conception of the possibilities of the future before him," by way of giving perspective and self-confidence? Do we have many mediaeval-type people to-day?

4. Show how the work of Petrarch required a man with a strong historic sense.

5. Show the awakening of the modern scientific spirit in the critical and reconstructive work of the scholars of the Revival.

6. Of what was the exposure of the forgery of the "Donation of Constantine" a precursor?

7. Contrast the modern and the mediaeval spirit as related to learning.

8. Suppose that we should unexpectedly unearth in Mexico a vast literature of a very learned and scholarly people who once inhabited the United States, and should discover a key by which to read it. Would the interest awakened be comparable with that awakened by the revival of Greek in Italy? Why?

9. What does the fact that no copy of Quintilian's Institutes, a very famous Roman book, was known in Europe before 1416 indicate as to the destruction of books during the early Christian period?

10. What does the fact that the Christians knew little about Greek literature or scholarship for centuries, and that the awakening was in large part brought about by the pressure of the Turks on the Eastern Empire, indicate as to intercourse among Mediterranean peoples during the Middle Ages?

11. How do you explain the fact that the recovery of the ancient learning was very largely the work of young men, and that older professors in the universities frequently held aloof from any connection with the movement?

12. Compare the financial support of the Revival in Italy with the support of universities and of scientific undertakings in America during recent times.

13. Explain the long-delayed interest in the Revival in the northern countries.

14. Trace the larger steps in the transference of Greek literature and learning from Athens, in the fifth century B.C., to its arrival at Harvard, in Massachusetts, in 1636.

15. What was the importance of the rediscovery of Hebrew?

16. Show how the invention of printing was a revolutionary force of the first magnitude.

17. Why should a license from the Church have been necessary to print a book? Have we any remaining vestiges of this church control over books?

18. Do you see any special reason why Venice should have become the early center of the book trade?

19. Show how the printing-press became "a formidable rival to the pulpit and the sermon, and one of the greatest instruments for human progress and liberty."

20. One writer has characterized the Revival of Learning as the beginnings of the emergence of the individual from institutional control, and the substitution of the humanities for the divinities as the basis of education. Is this a good characterization of a phase of the movement?

21. Counting each edition of a printed book at only three hundred copies, how many volumes had been printed before 1500 at the places listed in footnote 3, page 257?