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.