QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Explain just what is meant by the statement that mediaeval education was narrowly technical.
2. State the educational ideals of the new secondary schools evolved by the Italian humanistic scholars, and show whether these ideals have been best embodied in the German gymnasium or the English grammar school.
3. How do you explain the merchants and bankers and princes of Italy being more interested in the revival-of-learning movement than the Church and university scholars? Do such classes to-day show the same type of interest in aiding learning?
4. What was the particular importance of the recovery of Quintilian's Institutes? Of Cicero's Orations and Letters?
5. What better methods could the Italian court schools have used to enable them to cover the university Arts course in shorter time? How would this have advanced the character of the instruction in Arts in the university?
6. Show how the type of education developed in the Italian court schools was superior to that of the best of the cathedral schools. To that developed by Sturm.
7. Show how the new type of secondary schools was naturally associated with court and nobility and men of large worldly affairs, and how in consequence the new secondary education became and for long continued to be considered as aristocratic education.
8. Explain how the terms college, lycée, gymnasium, academy, and grammar school all came to be employed, in different countries, to designate about the same type of secondary school.
9. Had the purified Latin been restored, as the general international language of learning and government, would it have helped materially in bringing about the civilizing influences Erasmus saw in it?
10. Has the development of separate nationalities and different national languages aided in advancing international peace and civilization? Why?
11. Why should the new humanistic studies have developed religious fervor in Germany and England, in place of the patriotic fervor of the Italian scholars?
12. Was the struggle against the introduction of the new learning into the German universities parallel to the late struggle against the introduction of science into American universities?
13. Contrast the aim of Sturm's school with that of the Italian court schools, and the English grammar schools. Point out the new tendencies in his work.
14. Does the sentence quoted from Elyot's Governour express well the changed conditions in England at the middle of the sixteenth century? Do such changed conditions always demand educational reorganizations?
15. What basis, if any, did the opponents of Colet's school have for denouncing it as a temple of idolatry and heathenism?
16. Show how it was natural that the first American school should have been a Latin grammar school in type.
17. Show that the new conception as to education, as expressed by the new humanism, found a public ready to support it. What was the nature of this public?
18. Show how the new schools were "close to the most progressive forces in the national life," and the influence of this, particularly in England and America, in fixing classical training as the approved type of secondary education.
19. Explain how the written theme of to-day is the successor of the mediaeval disputation.
20. Show how the methods of instruction employed in the new Latin grammar schools have been passed over to the native-language schools.
21. From the paragraph quoted from Leach (p. 282), explain why a knowledge of Latin was for so long regarded as synonymous with being educated.
22. Show how instruction in Latin, by being changed from cultural to disciplinary ends, made French the language of diplomacy and society, tended to elevate all the vernacular tongues, and marked the beginnings of the end of the importance of Latin as a school study except for the purposes of the Roman Catholic Church.
23. What was the purpose of the Latin instruction, as you received it?
24. Does it require a higher quality of teaching to impart the cultural aspect of a study than is required for the disciplinary?