FOOTNOTES:
[41] Plutarch, Morals, vol. I. p. 9.
[42] Cicero, De Republica, IV. 115.
[43] Cicero, De Divinatione, II. 2.
[44] In principle, this is the same as the system of writing commended by Locke: “Get a plate graved with the Characters of such a Hand as you like best ... let several sheets of good Writing-paper be printed off with red Ink, which he has nothing to do but go over with a good Pen fill’d with black Ink, which will quickly bring his Hand to the Formation of those Characters, being first shewed where to begin, and how to form every Letter.” (On Education, § 160.) (P.)
[45] “Quintilian has treated this question with great breadth and eloquence.” (Traité des Études, Liv. IV. Art. 2.)
[46] Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, Watson’s Translation, Book I. chap. II. 6, 7.
[47] Institutes, Book I. chap. IX.
[48] Institutes, Book I. chap. XII.
[49] Equally great has been Plutarch’s influence on English thought and life. Sir Thomas North’s translation of Amyot’s version appeared in 1579, and furnished Shakespeare with the materials for his Coriolanus, Julius Cæsar, and Antony and Cleopatra. Milton, Wordsworth, and Browning are also debtors to the Parallel Lives. (P.)
[50] “Comment il faut nourrir les enfants,” in the translation by Amyot. “Of the Training of Children,” in Goodwin’s edition of the Morals (Vol. I.).
[51] The references that follow are to Plutarch’s Morals. The first translation into English was by Philemon Holland, in 1603. The American edition in five volumes (Boston, 1871) is worthy of all commendation. The references I make are to this edition. (P.)
[52] Of course Plutarch, like all the writers of antiquity, writes only in behalf of free-born children in good circumstances. “He abandons,” as he himself admits, “the education of the poor and the lowly.”
Plutarch seems to aim at what appears to him to be practicable. That he was liberal in his opinions must be evident, I think, from this extract: “It is my desire that all children whatsoever may partake of the benefits of education alike; but if yet any persons, by reason of the narrowness of their estates, cannot make use of my precepts, let them not blame me that give them, but Fortune, which disableth them from making the advantage by them they otherwise might. Though even poor men must use their utmost endeavor to give their children the best education; or, if they can not, they must bestow upon them the best that their abilities will reach.” (Morals, vol. I. pp. 19, 20.) (P.)
[53] Of the Training of Children, § 6.
[54] Morals, vol. II. p. 44.
[55] Morals, I. p. 463. This language directly follows the quotation given in the note (1) at the close of this paragraph. (P.)
[56] The exact reading is as follows: “For the mind requires not like an earthen vessel to be filled up; convenient fuel and aliment only will influence it with a desire of knowledge and ardent love of truth.” (Morals, I. p. 463.) This makes the author’s meaning more apparent. (P.)
[57] This does not mean that Plutarch sets a low value on memory, for he says: “Above all things, we must exercise the memory of children, for it is the treasury of knowledge.”
[58] “Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri.”
[59] “Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.” (Sat. x. 356.)
[CHAPTER IV.]
THE EARLY CHRISTIANS AND THE MIDDLE AGE.
THE NEW SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY; THE POVERTY OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CENTURIES IN RESPECT OF EDUCATION; THE FATHERS OF THE CHURCH; SAINT JEROME AND THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS; PHYSICAL ASCETICISM; INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL ASCETICISM; PERMANENT TRUTHS; INTELLECTUAL FEEBLENESS OF THE MIDDLE AGE; CAUSES OF THE IGNORANCE OF THE MIDDLE AGE; THE THREE RENASCENCES; CHARLEMAGNE; ALCUIN; THE SUCCESSORS OF CHARLEMAGNE; SCHOLASTICISM; ABELARD; THE SEVEN LIBERAL ARTS; METHODS AND DISCIPLINE; THE UNIVERSITIES; GERSON; VITTORINO DA FELTRE; OTHER TEACHERS AT THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGE; RECAPITULATION; ANALYTICAL SUMMARY.
69. The New Spirit of Christianity.—By its dogmas, by the conception of the equality of all human creatures, by its spirit of charity, Christianity introduced new elements into the conscience, and seemed called to give a powerful impetus to the moral education of men. The doctrine of Christ was at first a reaction of free will and of personal dignity against the despotism of the State. “A full half of man henceforth escaped the action of the State. Christianity taught that man no longer belonged to society except in part; that he was under allegiance to it by his body and his material interests; that being subject to a tyrant, he must submit; that as a citizen of a republic, he ought to give his life for it; but that in respect of his soul, he was free, and owed allegiance only to God.”[60] Henceforth it was not simply a question of training citizens for the service of the State; but the conception of a disinterested development of the human person made its appearance in the world. On the other hand, in proclaiming that all men had the same destiny, and that they were all equal in the sight of God, Christianity raised the poor and the disinherited from their condition of misery, and promised them all the same instruction. To the idea of liberty was added that of equality; and equal justice for all, and participation in the same rights, were contained in germ in the doctrine of Christianity.
70. Poverty of the First Christian Centuries in Respect of Education.—Nevertheless, the germs contained in the doctrines of the new religion did not bear fruit at once. It is easy to analyze the causes which led to the poverty of educational thought during the first centuries of the Christian era.
In the first place, the Christian instruction was addressed to barbarous peoples who could not at once rise to a high intellectual and moral culture. According to the celebrated comparison of Jouffroy, the invasion of the barbarians into the midst of ancient society was like an armful of green wood thrown upon a blazing fire; at first there could issue from it only a mass of smoke.
Moreover, we must take into account the fact that the early Christians, in order to establish their faith, had to struggle against difficulties which were ever being renewed. The first centuries were a period of struggle, of conquest, and of organization, which left but little opportunity for the disinterested study of education. In their contests with the ancient world, the early Christians came to include in a common hatred classical literature and pagan religion. Could they receive with sympathy the literary and scientific inheritance of a society whose morals they repudiated, and whose beliefs they were bent on destroying?
On the other hand, the social condition of the men who first attached themselves to the new religion turned them aside from the studies which are a preparation for real life. Obliged to conceal themselves, to betake themselves to the desert, true Pariahs of the pagan world, they lived a life of contemplation; they were naturally led to conceive an ascetic and monastic existence as the ideal of education.
Moreover, by its mystical tendencies, Christianity at the first could not be a good school for a practical and humane system of education. The Christian was detached from the commonwealth of man, only to enter into the commonwealth of God. He must break with a corrupt and perverse world. By privations, and by the renunciation of every pleasure, he must react against the immorality of Græco-Roman society. Man must aspire to imitate God; and God is absolute holiness, the very negation of all the conditions of earthly life,—supreme perfection. The very disproportion between such an ideal and human weakness as an actual fact must have betrayed the early Christians into leading a mystical life which was but a preparation for death. And the consequence of these doctrines was to make of the Church the exclusive mistress of education and instruction. Individual initiative, if called into play, on the one hand, by the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, was stifled, on the other, under the domination of the Church.
71. The Fathers of the Church.—Of the celebrated doctors who, by their erudition and eloquence, if not by their taste, made illustrious the beginning of Christianity, some were jealous mystics and sectaries, in whose eyes philosophical curiosity was a sin, and the love of letters a heresy; and others were Christians of a conciliatory temperament, who, in a certain measure, allied religious faith and literary culture.
Tertullian rejected all pagan education. He saw in classical culture only a robbery from God; a road to the false and arrogant wisdom of the ancient philosophers. Even Saint Augustine, who in his youth could not read the fourth book of the Æneid without shedding tears, and who had been devotedly fond of ancient poetry and eloquence, renounced, after his conversion, his literary tastes as well as the mad passions of his early manhood. It was by his influence that the Council of Carthage forbade the bishops to read the pagan authors.
This was not the course of Saint Basil, who demands, on the contrary, that the young Christian shall be conversant with the orators, poets, and historians of antiquity; who thinks that the poems of Homer inspire a love for virtue; and who desires, finally, that full use should be made of the treasures of ancient wisdom in the training of the young.[61] Nor was this the thought of Saint Jerome, who said he would be none the less a Ciceronian in becoming a Christian.
72. Saint Jerome and the Education of Girls.—The letters of Saint Jerome on the education of girls form the most valuable educational document of the first centuries of Christianity.[62] They have excited high admiration. Erasmus knew them by heart, and Saint Theresa read selections from them every day. It is impossible, to-day, while admiring certain parts of them, not to condemn the general spirit which pervades them,—a narrow spirit, distrustful of the world, which pushes the religious sentiment even to mysticism, and disdain for human affairs to asceticism.
73. Physical Asceticism.—It is no longer the question of giving power to the body, and thus of making of it the robust instrument of a cultured spirit, as the Greeks would have it. The body is an enemy that must be subdued by fasting, by abstinence, and by mortifications of the flesh.
“Do not allow Paula to eat in public, that is, do not let her take part in family entertainments, for fear that she may desire the meats that may be served there. Let her learn not to use wine, for it is the source of all impurity. Let her food be vegetables, and only rarely of fish; and let her eat so as always to be hungry.”
Contempt for the body is carried so far that cleanliness is almost interdicted.
“For myself, I entirely forbid a young girl to bathe.”
It is true that, alarmed at the consequences of such austerity, Saint Jerome, by way of exception, permits children the use of the bath, of wine, and of meat, but only “when necessity requires it, and lest the feet may fail them before having walked.”
74. Intellectual and Moral Asceticism.—For the mind, as well as for the body, we may say of Saint Jerome what Nicole wrote to a nun of his time: “You feed your pupils on bread and water.” The Bible is the only book recommended, and this is little; but it is the Bible entire, which is too much. The Song of Songs, with its sensual imagery, would be strange reading for a young girl. The arts, like letters, find no favor with the mysticism of Saint Jerome.
“Never let Paula listen to musical instruments; let her even be ignorant of the uses served by the flute and the harp.”
As for the flute, which the Greek philosophers also did not like, let it be so; but what shall we say of this condemnation of the harp, the instrument of David and the angels, and of religious music itself! How far we are, in common with Saint Jerome, from that complete life, from that harmonious development of all the faculties, which modern educators, Herbert Spencer, for example, present to us with reason as the ideal of education! Saint Jerome goes so far as to proscribe walking:—
“Do not let Paula be found in the ways of the world (emphatic paraphrase for streets), in the gatherings and in the company of her kindred; let her be found only in retirement.”
The ideal of Saint Jerome is a monastic and cloistered life, even in the world. But that which is graver still, that which is the fatal law of mysticism, is that Saint Jerome, after having proscribed letters, arts, and necessary and legitimate pleasures, even brings his condemnation to bear on the most honorable sentiments of the heart. The heart is human also, and everything human is evil and full of danger:
“Do not allow Paula to feel more affection for one of her companions than for others; do not allow her to speak with such a one in an undertone.” And as he held in suspicion even the affections of the family, the Doctor of the Church concludes thus:—
“Let her be educated in a cloister, where she will not know the world, where she will live as an angel, having a body but not knowing it, and where, in a word, you will be spared the care of watching over her.... If you will send us Paula, I will charge myself with being her master and nurse; I will give her my tenderest care; my old age will not prevent me from untying her tongue, and I shall be more renowned than the philosopher Aristotle, since I shall instruct, not a mortal and perishable king, but an immortal spouse of the Heavenly King.”
75. Permanent Truths.—The pious exaggerations of Saint Jerome only throw into sharper relief the justice and the excellence of some of his practical suggestions,—upon the teaching of reading, for example, or upon the necessity of emulation:—
“Put into the hands of Paula letters in wood or in ivory, and teach her the names of them. She will thus learn while playing. But it will not suffice to have her merely memorize the names of the letters, and call them in succession as they stand in the alphabet. You should often mix them, putting the last first, and the first in the middle.
“Induce her to construct words by offering her a prize, or by giving her, as a reward, what ordinarily pleases children of her age.... Let her have companions, so that the commendation she may receive may excite in her the feeling of emulation. Do not chide her for the difficulty she may have in learning. On the contrary, encourage her by commendation, and proceed in such a way that she shall be equally sensible to the pleasure of having done well, and to the pain of not having been successful.... Especially take care that she do not conceive a dislike for study that might follow her into a more advanced age.”[63]
76. Intellectual Feebleness of the Middle Age.—If the early doctors of the Church occasionally expressed some sympathy for profane letters, it is because, in their youth, before having received baptism, they had themselves attended the pagan schools. But these schools once closed, Christianity did not open others, and, after the fourth century, a profound night enveloped humanity. The labor of the Greeks and the Romans was as though it never had been. The past no longer existed. Humanity began anew. In the fifth century, Apollinaris Sidonius declares that “the young no longer study, that teachers no longer have pupils, and that learning languishes and dies.” Later, Lupus of Ferrières, the favorite of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald, writes that the study of letters had almost ceased. In the early part of the eleventh century, the Bishop of Laon, Adalberic, asserts that “there is more than one bishop who cannot count the letters of the alphabet on his fingers.” In 1291, of all the monks in the convent of Saint Gall, there was not one who could read and write. It was so difficult to find notaries public, that acts had to be passed verbally. The barons took pride in their ignorance. Even after the efforts of the twelfth century, instruction remained a luxury for the common people; it was the privilege of the ecclesiastics, and even they did not carry it very far. The Benedictines confess that the mathematics were studied only for the purpose of calculating the date of Easter.
77. Causes of the Ignorance of the Middle Age.—What were the permanent causes of that situation which lasted for ten centuries? The Catholic Church has sometimes been held responsible for this. Doubtless the Christian doctors did not always profess a very warm sympathy for intellectual culture. Saint Augustine had said: “It is the ignorant who gain possession of heaven (indocti cœlum rapiunt).” Saint Gregory the Great, a pope of the sixth century, declared that he would blush to have the holy word conform to the rules of grammar. Too many Christians, in a word, confounded ignorance with holiness. Doubtless, towards the seventh century, the darkness still hung thick over the Christian Church. Barbarians invaded the Episcopate, and carried with them their rude manners. Doubtless, also, during the feudal period the priest often became soldier, and remained ignorant. It would, however, be unjust to bring a constructive charge against the Church of the Middle Age, and to represent it as systematically hostile to instruction. Directly to the contrary, it is the clergy who, in the midst of the general barbarism, preserved some vestiges of the ancient culture. The only schools of that period are the episcopal and claustral schools, the first annexed to the bishops’ palaces, the second to the monasteries. The religious orders voluntarily associated manual labor with mental labor. As far back as 530, Saint Benedict founded the convent of Monte Cassino, and drew up statutes which made reading and intellectual labor a part of the daily life of the monks.
In 1179, the third Lateran Council promulgated the following decree:—
“The Church of God, being obliged like a good and tender mother to provide for the bodily and spiritual wants of the poor, desirous to procure for poor children the opportunity for learning to read, and for making advancement in study, orders that each cathedral shall have a teacher charged with the gratuitous instruction of the clergy of that church, and also of the indigent scholars, and that he be assigned a benefice, which, sufficient for his subsistence, may thus open the door of the school to the studious youth. A tutor[64] shall be installed in the other churches and in the monasteries where formerly there were funds set apart for this purpose.”
It is not, then, to the Church that we must ascribe the general intellectual torpor of the Middle Age. Other causes explain that long slumber of the human mind. The first is the social condition of the people. Security and leisure, the indispensable conditions for study, were completely lacking to people always at war, overwhelmed in succession by the barbarians, the Normans, the English, and by the endless struggles of feudal times. The gentlemen of the time aspired only to ride, to hunt, and to figure in tournaments and feats of arms. Physical education was above all else befitting men whose favorite vocation, both by habit and necessity, was war. On the other hand, the enslaved people did not suspect the utility of instruction. In order to comprehend the need of study, that great liberator, one must already have tasted liberty. In a society where the need of instruction had not yet been felt, who could have taken the initiative in the work of instructing the people?
Let us add that the Middle Age presented still other conditions unfavorable for the propagation of instruction, in particular, the lack of national languages, those necessary vehicles of education. The vernacular languages are the instruments of intellectual emancipation. Among a people where a dead language is supreme, a language of the learned, accessible only to the select few, the lower classes necessarily remain buried in ignorance. Moreover, Latin books themselves were rare. Lupus of Ferrières was obliged to write to Rome, and to address himself to the Pope in person, in order to procure for his use a work of Cicero’s. Without books, without schools, without any of the indispensable implements of intellectual labor, what could be done for the mental life? It took refuge in certain monasteries; erudition flourished only in narrow circles, with a privileged few, and the rest of the nation remained buried in an obscure night.
78. The Three Renascences.—It has been truly said that there were three Renascences: the first, which owed its beginning to Charlemagne, and whose brilliancy did not last; the second, that of the twelfth century, the issue of which was Scholasticism; and the third, the great Renaissance of the sixteenth century, which still lasts, and which the French Revolution has completed.
79. Charlemagne.—Charlemagne undoubtedly formed the purpose of diffusing instruction about him. He ardently sought it for himself, drilled himself in writing, and learned Latin and Greek, rhetoric and astronomy. He would have communicated to all who were about him the same ardor for study. “Ah! that I had twelve clerics,” he exclaimed, “as perfectly instructed as were Jerome and Augustine!” It was naturally upon the clergy that he counted, to make of them the instruments of his plans; but, as one of his capitularies of 788 shows, there was need that the clergy themselves should be reminded of the need of instruction: “We have thought it useful that, in the bishops’ residences, and in the monasteries, care be taken not only to live according to the rules of our holy religion, but, in addition, to teach the knowledge of letters to those who are capable of learning them by the aid of our Lord. Although it avails more to practise the law than to know it, it must be known before it can be practised. Several monasteries having sent us manuscripts, we have observed that, in the most of them, the sentiments were good, but the language bad. We exhort you, then, not only not to neglect the study of letters, but to devote yourselves to them with all your power.”
On the other hand, the nobles did not make any great effort to justify their social rank by the degree of their knowledge. One day, as Charlemagne entered a school, displeased with the indolence and the ignorance of the young barons who attended it, he addressed them in these severe terms: “Do you count upon your birth, and do you feel a pride in it? Take notice that you shall have neither government nor bishoprics, if you are not better instructed than others.”
80. Alcuin (735-804).—Charlemagne was seconded in his efforts by Alcuin of England, of whom it might be said, that he was the first minister of public instruction in France. It is he who founded the Palatine school, a sort of imperial and itinerant academy which followed the court on its travels. It was a model school, where Alcuin had for his pupils the four sons and two daughters of Charlemagne, and Charlemagne himself, always eager to be instructed.
Alcuin’s method was not without originality, but it is a great mistake to say that it resembles the method of Socrates. Alcuin doubtless proceeds by interrogation; but here it is the pupil who interrogates, and the teacher who responds.
“What is speech? asks Pepin, the eldest son of Charlemagne. It is the interpreter of the soul, replies Alcuin. What is life? It is an enjoyment for some, but for the wretched it is a sorrow, a waiting for death. What is sleep? The image of death. What is writing? It is the guardian of history. What is the body? The tenement of the soul. What is day? A summons to labor.”[65]
All this is either commonplace or artificial. The sententious replies of Alcuin may be fine maxims, fit for embellishing the memory; but in this procedure of the mere scholar, affected by the over-refinements of his time, there is nothing which can call into activity the intelligence of the pupil.
Nevertheless the name of Alcuin marks an era in the history of education. His was the first attempt to form an alliance between classical literature and Christian inspiration,—to create a “Christian Athens,” according to the emphatic phrase of Alcuin himself.
81. The Successors of Charlemagne.—It had been the ambition of Charlemagne to reign over a civilized society, rather than over a barbarous people. Convinced that the only basis of political unity is a unity of ideas and of morals, he thought to find the basis of that moral unity in religion, and religion itself he purposed to establish upon a more widely diffused system of instruction. But these ideas were too advanced for the time, and their execution too difficult for the circumstances then existing. A new decadence followed the era of Charlemagne. The clergy did not respond to the hopes which the great emperor had placed on them. As far back as 817, the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle decided that henceforth no more day-pupils should be received into the conventual schools, for the reason that too large a number of pupils would make impossible the maintenance of the monastic discipline. No one of Charlemagne’s successors seems to have taken up the thought of the great emperor; no one of them was preoccupied with the problems of education. It is upon despotic authority, and not upon the intellectual progress of their subjects, that those unintelligent rulers wished to found their power. Under Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald there were constructed more castles than schools.
The kings of France were far from imitating the Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred the Great (849-901), to whom tradition ascribes these two sayings: “The English ought always to be free, as free as their own thoughts”; “Free-born sons should know how to read and write.”
82. Scholasticism.—It was not till the twelfth century that the human mind was awakened. That was the age of Scholasticism, the essential character of which was the study of reasoning, and the practice of dialectics, or syllogistic reasoning. The syllogism, which reaches necessary conclusions from given premises, was the natural instrument of an age of faith, when men wished simply to demonstrate immutable dogmas, without ever making an innovation on established beliefs. It has often been observed that the art of reasoning is the science of a people still in the early stage of its progress; we might almost say of a barbarous people. A subtile dialectic is in perfect keeping with manners still rude, and with a limited state of knowledge. It is only an intellectual machine. It was not then a question of original thinking. All that was necessary was simply to reason upon conceptions already acquired, and the sacred depository of these was kept in charge by Theology. Consequently, there was no independent science. Philosophy, according to the language of the times, was but the humble servant of Theology. The dialectics of the doctors of the Middle Age was but a subtile commentary on the sacred books and on the doctrines of Aristotle.[66] It seems, says Locke, to see the inertness of the Middle Age, that God was pleased to make of man a two-footed animal, while leaving to Aristotle the task of making him a thinking being. From his point of view, an able educator of the seventeenth century, the Abbé Fleury, pronounces this severe judgment on the scholastic method:—
“This way of philosophizing on words and thoughts, without examining the things themselves, was certainly an easy way of getting along without a knowledge of facts, which can be acquired only by reading” (Fleury should have added and by observation); “and it was an easy way of dazzling the ignorant laics by peculiar terms and vain subtilties.”
But Scholasticism had its hour of glory, its erudite doctors, its eloquent professors, chief among whom was Abelard.
83. Abelard (1079-1142).—A genuine professor of higher instruction, Abelard, by the prestige of his eloquence, gathered around him at Paris thousands of students. Human speech, the living words of the teacher, had then an authority, an importance, which it has lost in part since books, everywhere distributed, have, to a certain extent, superseded oral instruction. At a time when printing did not exist, when manuscript copies were rare, a teacher who combined knowledge with the gift of speech was a phenomenon of incomparable interest, and students flocked from all parts of Europe to take advantage of his lectures. Abelard is the most brilliant representative of the scholastic pedagogy, with an original and personal tendency towards the emancipation of the mind. “It is ridiculous,” he said, “to preach to others what we can neither make them understand, nor understand ourselves.” With more boldness than Saint Anselm, he applied dialectics to theology, and attempted to reason out the grounds of his faith.
84. The Seven Liberal Arts.—The seven liberal arts constituted what may be called the secondary instruction of the Middle Age, such as was given in the claustral or conventual schools, and later, in the universities. The liberal arts were distributed into two courses of study, known as the trivium and the quadrivium. The trivium comprised grammar (Latin grammar, of course), dialectics, or logic, and rhetoric; and the quadrivium, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. It is important to note the fact that this programme contains only abstract and formal studies,—no real and concrete studies. The sciences which teach us to know man and the world, such as history, ethics, the physical and natural sciences, were omitted and unknown, save perhaps in a few convents of the Benedictines. Nothing which can truly educate man, and develop his faculties as a whole, enlists the attention of the Middle Age. From a course of study thus limited there might come skillful reasoners and men formidable in argument, but never fully developed men.[67]
85. Methods and Discipline.—The methods employed in the ecclesiastical schools of the Middle Age were in accord with the spirit of the times, when men were not concerned about liberty and intellectual freedom; and when they thought more about the teaching of dogmas than about the training of the intelligence. The teachers recited or read their lectures, and the pupils learned by heart. The discipline was harsh. Corrupt human nature was distrusted. In 1363, pupils were forbidden the use of benches and chairs, on the pretext that such high seats were an encouragement to pride. For securing obedience, corporal chastisements were used and abused. The rod is in fashion in the fifteenth as it was in the fourteenth century.
“There is no other difference,” says an historian, “except that the rods in the fifteenth century are twice as long as those in the fourteenth.”[68] Let us note, however, the protest of Saint Anselm, a protest that pointed out the evil rather than cured it. “Day and night,” said an abbot to Saint Anselm, “we do not cease to chastise the children confided to our care, and they grow worse and worse.” Anselm replied, “Indeed! You do not cease to chastise them! And when they are grown up, what will they become? Idiotic and stupid. A fine education that, which makes brutes of men! ... If you were to plant a tree in your garden, and were to enclose it on all sides so that it could not extend its branches, what would you find when, at the end of several years, you set it free from its bands? A tree whose branches would be bent and crooked; and would it not be your fault, in having so unreasonably confined it?”
86. The Universities.—Save claustral and cathedral schools, to which must be added some parish schools, the earliest example of our village schools, the sole educational establishment of the Middle Age was what is called the University. Towards the thirteenth and fourteenth century we see multiplying in the great cities of Europe those centres of study, those collections of students which recall from afar the schools of Plato and Aristotle. Of such establishments were the university which opened at Paris for the teaching of theology and philosophy (1200); the universities of Naples (1224), of Prague (1345), of Vienna (1365), of Heidelberg (1386), etc.[69] Without being completely affranchised from sacerdotal control, these universities were a first expansion of free science. As far back as the ninth century, the Arabs had given an example to the rest of Europe by founding at Salamanca, at Cordova, and in other cities of Spain, schools where all the sciences were cultivated.
87. Gerson (1363-1429).—With the gentle Gerson, the supposed author of the Imitation, it seems that the dreary dialectics disappear to let the heart speak and make way for feeling. The Chancellor of the University of Paris is distinguished from the men of his time by his love for the people. He wrote in the common tongue little elementary treatises for the use and within the comprehension of the plain people. His Latin work, entitled De parvulis ad Christum trahendis (“Little children whom we must lead to Christ”), gives evidence of a large spirit of sweetness and goodness. It abounds in subtile and delicate observations. For example, Gerson demands of teachers patience and tenderness: “Little children,” he says, “are more easily managed by caresses than by fear.” For these frail creatures he dreads the contagion of example. “No living being is more in danger than the child of allowing himself to be corrupted by another child.” In his eyes, the little child is a delicate plant that must be carefully protected against every evil influence, and, in particular, against pernicious literature, such as the Roman de la Rose. Gerson condemns corporal punishment, and requires that teachers shall have for their pupils the affection of a father:—
“Above all else, let the teacher make an effort to be a father to his pupils. Let him never be angry with them. Let him always be simple in his instruction, and relate to his pupils that which is wholesome and agreeable.” Tender-hearted and exalted spirit, Gerson is a precursor of Fenelon.[70]
88. Vittorino da Feltre (1379-1446).—It is a pleasure to place beside Gerson one of his Italian contemporaries, the celebrated Vittorino da Feltre, a professor in the University of Padua. It was as preceptor to the sons of the Prince of Gonzagas, and as founder of an educational establishment at Venice, that Vittorino found occasion to show his aptitude for educational work. With him, education again became what it was in Greece,—the harmonious development of mind and body. Gymnastic exercises, such as swimming, riding, fencing, restored to honor; attention to the exterior qualities of fine bearing; an interesting and agreeable method of instruction; a constant effort to discover the character and aptitudes of children; a conscientious preparation for each lesson; assiduous watchfulness over the work of pupils; such are the principal features of the pedagogy of Vittorino da Feltre, a system of teaching evidently in advance of his time, and one which deserves a longer study.
89. Other Teachers at the Close of the Middle Age.—Were we writing a work of erudition, there would be other thinkers to point out in the last years of the Middle Age, in that uncertain and, so to speak, twilight period which serves as a transition from the night of the Middle Age to the full day of the Renaissance. Among others, let us notice the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry and Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini.
The Chevalier de la Tour-Landry, in the work which he wrote for the education of his daughters (1372), scarcely rises above the spirit of his time. Woman, as he thinks, is made to pray and to go to church. The model which he sets before his daughters is a countess, who “each day wished to hear three masses.” He recommends fasting three times a week in order “the better to subdue the flesh,” and to prevent it “from diverting itself too much.” There is neither responsibility nor proper dignity for the wife, who owes obedience to her husband, her lord, and “should do his will, whether wrong or right; if wrong, she is absolved from blame, as the blame falls on her lord.”
Æneas Sylvius, the future Pope Pius II., in his tract on The Education of Children (1451), is already a man of the Renaissance, since he recommends with enthusiasm the reading and study of most of the classical authors. However, he traces a programme of studies relatively liberal. By the side of the humanities he places the sciences of geometry and arithmetic, “which are necessary,” he says, “for training the mind and assuring rapidity of conceptions”; and also history and geography. He had himself composed historical narratives accompanied by maps. The distrusts of an overstrained devotion were no longer felt by a teacher who wrote, “There is nothing in the world more precious or more beautiful than an enlightened intelligence.”
90. Recapitulation.—It is thus that the Middle Age in drawing to a close came nearer and nearer, in the way of continuous progress, to the decisive emancipation which the Renaissance and the Reformation were soon to perpetuate. But the Middle Age, in itself, whatever effort may be put forth at this day to rehabilitate it, and to discover in it the golden age of modern societies, remains an ill-starred epoch. A few virtues, negative for the most part, virtues of obedience and consecration, cannot atone for the real faults of those rude and barbarous centuries. A higher education reserved to ecclesiastics and men of noble rank; an instruction which consisted in verbal legerdemain, which developed only the mechanism of reasoning, and made of the intelligence a prisoner of the formal syllogism; agreeably to the barbarism of primitive times, a fantastic pedantry which lost itself in superficial discussions and in verbal distinctions; popular education almost null, and restricted to the teaching of the catechism in Latin; finally, a Church, absolute and sovereign, which determined for all, great and small, the limits of thought, of belief, and of action; such was, from our own point of view, the condition of the Middle Age. It was time for the coming of the Renaissance to affranchise the human mind, to excite and to reveal to itself the unconscious need of instruction, and by the fruitful alliance of the Christian spirit and profane letters, to prepare for the coming of modern education.
[91. Analytical Summary.—1. The fundamental characteristic of Middle Age education was the domination of religious conceptions. The training was for the life to come, rather than for this life; it was almost exclusively religious and moral; was based on authority; and included the whole human race.
2. This alliance of church and school, while giving an exclusive aim to education, also gave it a spirit of intense seriousness and earnestness. The survivals of this historical alliance are church and parish schools, and a disposition of the modern Church to dispute the right of the State to educate.
3. The supreme importance attached to the Scriptures made education literary; made instruction dogmatic and arbitrary; exalted words over things; inculcated a taste for abstract and formal reasoning; made learning a process of memorizing; and stifled the spirit of free inquiry.
4. The inclusion of the whole world in one Christian Commonwealth, led to the intellectual enfranchisement of woman and to the rise of primary education proper.
5. The general tendency was towards harshness in discipline, coarseness in habits and manners, and a contempt for the amenities of life.
6. Scholasticism erred by exaggeration; but its general effect was to develop the power of deductive reasoning, to teach the use of language as the instrument of thought, and to make apparent the need of nice discriminations in the use of words.
7. The great intellectual lesson taught is the extreme difficulty of attaining compass, symmetry, and moderation.]