Education in the Middle Ages
67
In Quintilian’s second stage of education, from age 7 to 14, the teacher was advised that the boy is using his sense experiences to form clear ideas and place them in his memory. The boy is to attend a ludus to learn to read and write his spoken language where he is to be instructed by a competent and ethical teacher. Instruction should be gradual and thorough, with children learning the alphabet by tracing ivory letters. Anticipating modern education, Quintilian advised having breaks for games and recess, so students could renew their energy. Quintilian’s third stage, from age 14 to 17, emphasized the liberal arts. As a proponent of Greek and Latin bilingual and bicultural education, he wanted students to study grammar, literature, history, and mythology in both languages. They also were expected to study music, geometry, astronomy, and gymnastics. The fourth stage, from age 17 to 21, was devoted to rhetoric, which included drama, poetry, law, philosophy, public speaking, declamation, and debate.42 Declamations— systematic speaking exercises—were especially important. When Quintilian assessed a student to be ready for public speaking, the novice orator delivered an oration to an audience in the forum that was then critiqued by his teacher. The teacher corrected the student’s mistakes with a sense of authority but also with patience, tact, and consideration. Quintilian’s program of rhetorical education resembled contemporary preservice teacher education. The practice oration was like supervised student teaching. The supervisor’s critique of the beginning teacher’s classroom skills resembles the master rhetorician’s critique of the novice orator’s speaking abilities. Quintilian’s ideas of rhetorical education continued on in Western history. In the medieval era, rhetoric was taught in cathedral schools and universities. It surfaced again in the Renaissance, when educators looked to the classical traditions of Greece and Rome to revive literary humanism. Rhetoric had a place in higher education at Oxford and Cambridge in England and at Harvard and Yale in the United States.
FOCUS Has your educational experience been speculative and abstract like the Greeks, or has it been practical and applied in the Roman sense? Has your education’s purpose been to prepare you for the next phase of schooling, or did it help you deal with the problems you face in daily life?
3-6b Rome’s Significance in World Education Rome’s Latin language was not only important for literate and educated Romans but for later generations of European and American students, especially those attending secondary schools in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. During this time, Latin, considered the necessary language of an educated person, was generally a requirement for entry into colleges and universities.
3-7 Education in the Middle Ages Historians designate the one thousand years after Rome’s fall in the fifth century to America’s discovery in the fifteenth century as the “Middle Ages,” between the end of the Greco-Roman classical period and the beginning of the modern era. By the Middle
For a hypertext edition of Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, visit http://archive.org/stream /institutioorator00quin/institutiooratorio00quin-djvu.txt.
42
322 BCE Death of Aristotle
360 BCE
340 BCE
320 BCE
300 BCE
335 BCE Aristotle founds Lyceum 347 BCE Death of Plato
Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.