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

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

To make the instruction as practical as possible, and thus prepare the pupils for service as Latin scholars in public or scholarly pursuits, the ancient literature was studied in part as a storehouse of adequate and elegant expression, and numerous phrase books [17] were written for use in the schools. When we remember that Latin was still the language of all learned literature, of the university classroom, of most diplomatic and legal documents, and a practical necessity for travel or communication abroad, we can realize why so much emphasis was placed on the constant use of Latin as the language of the school. [18] As Leach [19] so well puts it:

"The learned professions required a competent knowledge of Latin far more directly then than now. A need for Latin was not confined to the Church and the priest. The diplomatist, the lawyer, the civil servant, the physician, the naturalist, the philosopher, wrote, read, and to a large extent spoke and perhaps thought in Latin. Nor was Latin only the language of the higher professions. A merchant, or a bailiff of a manor, wanted it for his accounts; every town clerk or guild clerk wanted it for his minute book. Columbus had to study for his voyages in Latin; the general had to study tactics in it. The architect, the musician, every one who was neither a mere soldier nor a mere handicraftsman, wanted, not a smattering of grammar, but a living acquaintance with the tongue, as a spoken as well as a written language."

THE SCHOOLS BECOME FORMAL. After the new learning had obtained a firm footing in the schools there happened what has often happened in the history of new educational efforts—that is, the new learning became narrow, formal, and fixed, and lost the liberal spirit which actuated its earlier promoters. In the beginning the Italian humanists had aimed at large personal self-culture and individual development, and the northern humanists at moral and religious reform and preparation for useful service, both using the classics as a means to these new ends. After about 1500 in Italy, and 1600 in the northern countries, when the new-learning schools had become well established and thoroughly organized, the tendency arose to make the means an end in itself. Instead of using the classical literatures to impart a liberal education, give larger vision, and prepare for useful public service, they came to be used largely for disciplinary ends. The teaching of Campion at Prague (1574) well illustrates this degeneracy (R. 146). This change alienated practical men from the schools. French now in turn became the language of the court and of diplomacy, and the work of the schools tended to be confined largely to preparing students to enter the universities or the service of the Church. Men of the world hence turned to a new type of schools which now arose (chapter xvii), and which made preparation for social efficiency in a modern world their aim.

In consequence the aim of the new humanistic education came in time to be thought of in terms of languages and literatures, instead of in terms of usefulness as a preparation for intelligent living, and educational effort was transferred from the larger human point of view of the early humanistic teachers to the narrower and much less important one of mastering Greek and Latin, writing verses, and cultivating a good (Ciceronian) Latin style. Sturm's school at Strassburg clearly shows the beginnings of such a transformation (R. 137). As Latin came to be less and less used by scholars in writing, passed out of use as the language of government and of international communication, was replaced by French as the language of polite society, and was gradually superseded in the university lecture room by the vernaculars, the practical motive for learning Latin died out, except for service in the Church, and the disciplinary and cultural value of the study of the classics alone remained. The disciplinary, being easier to give, and better within the understanding of most teachers, gradually won over the cultural. As a result, classical education gradually became narrow and formal, and drill in composition and declamation and imitation of the style of ancient authors—particularly Cicero, whence the term "Ciceronianism" which came to be applied to it—grew to be the ruling motives in instruction. By the end of the sixteenth century this change had taken place in both the secondary schools and the universities, and this narrow linguistic attitude continued to dominate classical education, in German lands until the mid-eighteenth, and in all other western European countries and in America until near the middle of the nineteenth century. It was not until vigorously challenged by the enthusiasts for modern scientific studies that the teachers of the classics awoke to the need of improving their instruction and restoring something of the old cultural value to what they were teaching.

The new learning in northern and western Europe was also much changed in character by the violent religious dissensions, following the Protestant Revolt, to a consideration of which we next turn.

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?