The History Of Education by Ellwood P. Cubberley (epub e reader .txt) 📖

(R. 114), show a much better-balanced course of instruction, though the time requirements given for each subject show how largely Aristotle predominated there also. Oxford (R. 115) kept up better the traditions of the earlier Seven Liberal Arts in its requirements, and classified the new works of Aristotle in three additional “philosophies”—natural, moral, and metaphysical. From four to seven years were required to complete the arts course, though the tendency was to reduce the length of the arts course as secondary schools below the university were evolved. [20]

In the Law Faculty, after Theology the largest and most important of all the faculties in the mediaeval university, the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian (p. 195) and the Decretum of Gratian (p. 196) were the textbooks read, with perhaps a little more practical work in discussion than in Arts or Medicine. The Oxford course of study in both Civil and Canon Law (R. 116 b-c) gives a good idea as to what was required for degrees in one of the best of the early law faculties.

In the Medical Faculty a variety of books—translations of Hippocrates (p.

197), Galen (p. 198), Avicenna (p. 198), and the works of certain writers at Salerno and Jewish and Moslem writers in Spain—were read and lectured on. The list of medical books used at Montpellier, [21] in 1340, which at that time was the foremost place for medical instruction in western Europe, shows the book-nature and the extent of the instruction given at the leading school of medicine of the time. It was, moreover, customary at Montpellier for the senior students to spend a summer in visiting the sick and doing practical work. We have here the merest beginnings of clinical instruction and hospital service, and at this stage medical instruction remained until quite modern times. The medical courses at Paris (R. 117) and Oxford (R. 116 d) were less satisfactory, only book instruction being required.

[Illustration: FIG. 64. A LECTURE ON CIVIL LAW BY GUILLAUME BENEDICTI (After a sixteenth-century wood engraving, now in the National Library, Paris, Cabinet of Designs)]

Both Law and Medicine were so dominated by the scholastic ideal and methods that neither accomplished what might have been possible in a freer atmosphere.

In the Theological Faculty the Sentences of Peter Lombard (p. 189) and the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas (p. 191) were the textbooks used.

The Bible was at first also used somewhat, but later came to be largely overshadowed by the other books and by philosophical discussions and debates on all kinds of hair-splitting questions, kept carefully within the limits prescribed by the Church. The requirements at Oxford (R. 116 a) give the course of instruction in one of the best of the theological faculties of the time. The teachers were scholastics, and scholastic methods and ideals everywhere prevailed. Roger Bacon’s (1214-1294) criticism of this type of theological study (R. 118), which he calls “horse loads, not at all [in consonance] with the most holy text of God,”

and “philosophical, both in substance and method,” gives an idea of the kind of instruction which came to prevail in the theological faculties under the dominance of the scholastic philosophers.

Years of study were required in each of these three professional faculties, as is shown by the statement of requirements as given for Montpellier, Paris (R. 117), and Oxford (R. 116 a).

[Illustration: FIG. 65. LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LEYDEN, IN HOLLAND

(After an engraving by J. C. Woudanus, dated 1610) This shows well the chained books, and a common type of bookcase in use in monasteries, churches, and higher schools. Counting 35 books to the case, this shows a library of 35 volumes on mathematics; 70 volumes each on literature, philosophy, and medicine; 140 volumes of historical books; 175

volumes on civil and canon law; and 160 volumes on theology, or a total of 770 volumes—a good-sized library for the time.]

METHODS OF INSTRUCTION. A very important reason why so long a period of study was required in each of the professional faculties, as well as in the Faculty of Arts, is to be found in the lack of textbooks and the methods of instruction followed. While the standard textbooks were becoming much more common, due to much copying and the long-continued use of the same texts, they were still expensive and not owned by many. [22]

[Illustration: PLATE 4. A LECTURE ON THEOLOGY BY ALBERTUS MAGNUS

An illuminated picture in a manuscript of 1310, now in the royal collection of copper engravings, at Berlin. The master in his chair is here shown “reading” to his students.]

To provide a loan collection of theological books for poor students we find, in 1271, a gift by will to the University of Paris (R. 119) of a private library, containing twenty-seven books. Even if the students possessed books, the master “read” [23] and commented from his “gloss” at great length on the texts being studied. Besides the mere text each teacher had a “gloss” or commentary for it—that is, a mass of explanatory notes, summaries, cross-references, opinions by others, and objections to the statements of the text. The “gloss” was a book in itself, often larger than the text, and these standard glosses, [24] or commentaries, were used in the university instruction for centuries. In Theology and Canon Law they were particularly extensive.

All instruction, too, was in Latin. The professor read from the Latin text and gloss, repeating as necessary, and to this the student listened.

Sometimes he read so slowly that the text could be copied, but in 1355

this method was prohibited at Paris (R. 121), and students who tried to force the masters to follow it “by shouting or whistling or raising a din, or by throwing stones,” were to be suspended for a year. The first step in the instruction was a minute and subtle analysis of the text itself, in which each line was dissected, analyzed, and paraphrased, and the comments on the text by various authors were set forth. Next all passages capable of two interpretations were thrown into the form of a question; pro and contra, after the manner of Abelard. The arguments on each side were advanced, and the lecturer’s conclusion set forth and defended. The text was thus worked over day after day in minute detail. Having as yet but little to teach, the masters made the most of what they had. A good example of the mediaeval plan of university instruction is found in the announcement of Odofredus, a distinguished teacher of Law at Bologna, about the middle of the thirteenth century, which Rashdall thinks is equally applicable to methods in other subjects. Odofredus says: First, I shall give you summaries of each title before I proceed to the text; secondly, I shall give you as clear and explicit a statement as I can of the purport of each Law (included in the title); thirdly, I shall read the text with a view to correcting it; fourthly, I shall briefly repeat the contents of the Law; fifthly, I shall solve apparent contradictions, adding any general principles of Law (to be extracted from the passage), and any distinctions and subtle and useful problems arising out of the Law with their solutions, as far as the Divine Providence shall enable me. And if any Law shall seem deserving, by reason of its celebrity or difficulty, of a Repetition, I shall reserve it for an evening Repetition.

It will be seen that both students and professors were bound to the text, as were the teachers of the Seven Liberal Arts in the cathedral schools before them. There was no appeal to the imagination, still less to observation, experiment, or experience. Each generation taught what it had learned, except that from time to time some thinker made a new organization, or some new body of knowledge was unearthed and added.

Another method much used was the debate, or disputation, and participation in a number of these was required for degrees (R. 116). These disputations were logical contests, not unlike a modern debate, in which the students took sides, cited authorities, and summarized arguments, all in Latin.

Sometimes a student gave an exhibition in which he debated both sides of a question, and summarized the argument, after the manner of the professors.

As a corrective to the memorization of lectures and texts, these disputations served a useful purpose in awakening intellectual vigor and logical keenness. They were very popular until into the sixteenth century, when new subject-matter and new ways of thinking offered new opportunities for the exercise of the intellect.

[Illustration: FIG. 66. A UNIVERSITY DISPUTATION

(From Fick’s Auf Deutschland’s H�hen Schulen)]

In teaching equipment there was almost nothing at first, and but little for centuries to come. Laboratories, workshops, gymnasia, good buildings and classrooms—all alike were equally unknown. Time schedules of lectures (Rs. 122, 123) came in but slowly, in such matters each professor being a free lance. Nor were there any libraries at first, though in time these developed. For a long time books were both expensive and scarce (Rs. 78, 119, 120). After the invention of printing (first book printed in 1456), university libraries increased rapidly and soon became the chief feature of the university equipment. Figure 65 shows the library of the University of Leyden, in Holland, thirty-five years after its foundation, and about one hundred and fifty years after the beginnings of printing. It shows a rather large increase in the size of book collections [25] after the introduction of printing, and a good library organization.

[ILLUSTRATION: FIG 67. A UNIVERSITY LECTURE AND LECTURE ROOM

(From a woodcut printed at Strassburg, 1608)]

VALUE OF THE TRAINING GIVEN. Measured in terms of modern standards the instruction was undoubtedly poor, unnecessarily drawn out, and the educational value low. We could now teach as much information, and in a better manner, in but a fraction of the time then required. Viewed also by the standards of instruction in the higher schools of Greece and Rome the conditions were almost equally bad. Viewed, though, from the standpoint of what had prevailed in western Europe during the dark period of the early Middle Ages, it represented a marked advance in method and content—except in pure literature, where there was an undoubted decline due to the absorbing interest in Dialectic—and it particularly marked a new spirit, as nearly critical as the times would allow. Despite the heterogeneous and but partially civilized student body, youthful and but poorly prepared for study, the drunkenness and fighting, the lack of books and equipment, the large classes and the poor teaching methods, and the small amount of knowledge which formed the grist for their mills and which they ground exceeding small, these new universities held within themselves, almost in embryo form, the largest promise for the intellectual future of western Europe which had appeared since the days of the old universities of the Hellenic world (R. 124). In these new institutions knowledge was not only preserved and transmitted, but was in time to be tremendously advanced and extended. They were the first organizations to break the monopoly of the Church in learning and teaching; they were the centers to which all new knowledge gravitated; under their shadow thousands of young men found intellectual companionship and in their classrooms intellectual stimulation; and in encouraging “laborious subtlety, heroic industry, and intense application”, even though on very limited subject-matter, and in training “men to think and work rather than to enjoy” (R. 124), they were preparing for the time when western Europe should awaken to the riches of Greece and Rome and to a new type of intellectual life of its own. From these beginnings the university organization has persisted and grown and