Overview 3.3: Significant Events in the History of Western Education to 1650 CE

overvieW 3.3

Significant eventS in the hiStOry Of WeStern educatiOn tO 1650 ce

Period Political and Social Events

Greek 1200 bCE trojan War 594 bCE Athenian constitutional reforms 479–338 bCE Golden Age of Greek (Athenian) culture

445–431 bCE 431–404 bCE

336–323 bCE Age of Pericles Peloponnesian War between Athens and sparta Alexander the Great 392 bCE Isocrates established rhetorical school in Athens

387 bCE 330 bCE

Significant Educational Events

c. 1200 bCE 399 bCE Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey trial of socrates 395 bCE Plato’s Republic

Plato founds Academy Aristotle’s Politics

Roman 753 bCE traditional date of Rome’s founding 449 bCE 167 bCE

96 CE

510 bCE 272 bCE 146 bCE

Roman republic established Rome dominates Italian Peninsula Greece becomes Roman province 49–44 bCE Dictatorship of Julius Caesar 31 bCE Roman empire begins 476 CE Fall of Rome in the West Latin primary schools, or ludi, appear Greek grammar school opened in Rome Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria

Medieval 713 CE Arab conquest of spain 800 CE 1096–1291 CE Charlemagne crowned Holy Roman Emperor Crusades to the Holy Land 1182–1226 CE st. Francis of Assisi

Renaissance 1295 CE Explorations of Marco Polo 1304–1374 CE Petrarch, author of odes and sonnets

1313–1375 CE boccaccio, founder of Italian vernacular literature 1079–1142 CE 1180 CE

1209 CE

Abelard, author of Sic et Non university of Paris granted papal charter and recognition university of Cambridge founded 1225–1274 CE thomas Aquinas, author of Summa Theologiae 1428 CE Da Feltre, classical humanist educator, established court school at Mantua 1509 CE Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly

1384 CE Founding of brethren of the Common Life 1393–1464 CE Cosimo de’Medici encourages revival of art and learning in Florence 1423 CE Invention of printing press Reformation 1455 CE Gutenberg bible printed 1524 CE Luther’s “Letter … in behalf of Christian schools”

1492 CE Columbus arrives in America 1517 CE Luther posts “ninety-Five theses” calling for church reform

1509–1564 CE John Calvin, Protestant reformer, founder of Calvinism 1509–1547 CE King Henry VIII of England, founder of the Church of England 1540 CE Jesuit order founded by Loyola 1545 CE Council of trent launches Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation 1524 CE Melanchthon, an associate of Luther, writes school codes in German states 1630–1650 CE John Knox organizes Calvinist schools in scotland

vernacular schools Primary

institutions that provided instruction in students’ common language, in contrast to schools that instructed in classical languages such as Greek or Latin. authority and to redefine Christian doctrines and practices.64 These religious reformers wanted to use education and schools to promote Protestantism. They asserted that every person had not only the right but also the religious obligation to read the Bible as the primary authority of truth. Their emphasis on reading the scriptures created a demand for more Bibles, which was met by the appearance of printed books.

The invention of the printing press in 1423 dramatically advanced literacy and schooling. Before the printing press, students painstakingly created their own copies of texts by recording dictation from teachers. By the mid-fifteenth century, European printers were experimenting with movable metal type. Johannes Gutenberg, a German jeweler, invented a durable metal alloy to form letters for the printing press. In 1455, Gutenberg’s Bible was the first major book printed. Printing spread throughout Europe, multiplying the output and cutting the costs of books. It made information accessible to a growing population of readers.65 It brought more textbooks into the schools and made the text part of the teacher’s method of instruction. The printing press inaugurated an information revolution, whose consequences were similar to the advent of data storage, retrieval, and dissemination by personal computers. (See Overview 3.3 for the invention of the printing press and other significant events in the history of education.)

Protestants established vernacular schools to instruct children in spoken languages such as German, Swedish, or English used in their religious services rather than the Catholic Church’s Latin. Protestant primary schools offered a basic curriculum of reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. While Catholic liturgies remained in Latin, Catholic schools, to compete with Protestants, also began to teach vernacular languages along with Latin.

Both Protestants and Catholics used schools to instill religious beliefs and practices approved by the particular denominations. Only members of the particular officially sanctioned church were hired as teachers. Religious authorities closely supervised teachers to make certain they were teaching approved doctrines. In fact, teacher supervision and licensing developed during the Reformation.

64Patrick Collinson, The Reformation: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2004); Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (New York: Penguin, 2005); John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008); and F. Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 65Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 (Verso World History Series, 2010); and Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

timeline

the renaiSSance

e r s toc k. com t Geor gios K ollid as /S h u t

1300 1340 1380 1420

1310 CE Dante’s “Divine Comedy” published

The death of the righteous man and the death of the sinner, illustration from a pictorial catechism, end of nineteenth century (colour litho), French School, (19th century)/Private Collection/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images

> PHoto 3.3 Illustration from a catechism shows the death of a religiously righteous man.

catechistic method of

instruction Catechisms—religious textbooks—were organized into questions and answers that summarized the particular denomination’s doctrines and practices.

Religious educators developed the catechistic method of instruction. Catechisms, religious textbooks, were organized into questions and answers that summarized the particular denomination’s doctrines and practices (Photo 3.3). Students were expected to memorize the set answers and to recite them as the teacher read the particular questions. Although memorization had always been a feature of schooling, the catechistic method reinforced it. The belief was that if children memorized the catechism, they would internalize the doctrines of their church. The question-and-answer format gained such a powerful hold on teaching methods that it was also used to teach secular subjects such as history and geography.

For example, Calvin’s Catechism of the Church of Geneva used the question and answer method:

Master: What is the chief end of human life?

Scholar: To know God by whom men were created.

In the nineteenth century, the same method appeared in Davenport’s History of the United States:

Q. When did the battle of Lexington take place?

A. On the 19th of April, 1775; here was shed the first blood in the

American Revolution.66

Religious and economic change worked to increase primary (elementary) school attendance and literacy rates. The Protestant emphasis on Bible reading caused more children, both girls and boys, to attend primary vernacular schools. The middle classes (the commercial and merchant sectors) sent their children to school to learn the practical skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. For example, only 10 percent of men and 2 percent of women in England were literate in 1500. By 1600, literacy rates had increased to 28 percent for men and 9 percent for women; by 1700, nearly 40 percent of English men and about 32 percent of English women were literate. Literacy rates tended to be higher in northern than in southern and eastern Europe and in urban rather than rural areas.67

66John Calvin, Tracts and Treatises on the Doctrine and Worship of the Church, II, trans. Henry Beveride (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1958), p. 37; and Bishop Davenport, History of the United States (Philadelphia: William Marchall and Co., 1833), p. 31. 67Mary Jo Maynes, Schooling in Western Europe: A Social History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).

1459 Gutenberg bible published

1469 Lorenzo di Medici assumes power in Florence

1498 Vasco da Gama and Portuguese fleet in India 1512 Erasmus’s de Copia published

1513 Machiavelli’s The Prince published

1460 1500 1560 1600

1511 Erasmus’s Praise of Folly published 1516 Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier published