Part 217

King Alfred "gathered round him at his own court the sons of his nobility to receive, in conjunction with his own children, a better education than their parents would be able or willing to give them in their own households. To this assemblage of pupils Asser has attached the name of school, and a violent controversy once distracted the literary world concerning the sense in which the word was to be understood, and whether it was not the beginning or origin of a learned institution still existing. In speaking of this subject, Asser has taken occasion to enumerate and describe the children who were born to Alfred from his wife Elswitha, daughter of Ethelred the 'Big,' alderman of the Gaini, and a noble of great wealth and influence in Mercia. 'The sons and daughters,' says Asser, 'which he had by his wife above mentioned, were Ethelfled the eldest, after whom came Edward, then Ethelgiva, then Ethelswitha, and Ethelwerd, besides those who died in their infancy, one of whom was Edmund. Ethelfled, when she arrived at a marriageable age, was united to Ethelred, earl of Mercia; Ethelgiva was dedicated to God, and submitted to the rules of a monastic life; Ethelwerd, the youngest, by the Divine counsels and admirable prudence of the king, was consigned to the schools of learning, where, with the children of almost all the nobility of the country, and many also who were not noble, he prospered under the diligent care of his teachers. Books in both languages, namely, in Latin and Saxon, were read in the school. They also learned to write; so that, before they were of an age to practise manly arts, namely hunting and such other pursuits as befit noblemen, they became studious and clever in the liberal arts. Edward and Ethelswitha were bred up in the king's court, and received great attention from their servants and nurses; nay, they continue to this day, with the love of all about them, and shew affability, and even gentleness, towards all, both foreigners and natives, and are in complete subjection to their father; nor, among their other studies which appertain to this life and are fit for noble youths, are they suffered to pass their time idly and unprofitably, without learning the liberal arts; for they have carefully learned the Psalms and Saxon books, especially the Saxon Poems, and are continually in the habit of making use of books.' The schools of learning, to which Asser alludes in this passage, as formed for the use of the king's children and the sons of his nobles, are again mentioned elsewhere by the same author, as 'the school which he had studiously collected together, consisting of many of the nobility of his own nation:' and in a third passage, Asser speaks of the 'sons of the nobility who were bred up in the royal household.' It is clear, then, from these expressions, that the king's exertions to spread learning among his nobles and to educate his own children, were of a most active and personal nature, unconnected with any institutions of a more public character: the school was kept in his own household, and not in a public seat of learning. We may perhaps adduce these expressions of Asser as militating against the notion, that an University or Public Seminary of Learning existed in the days of Alfred. Though it is most probable that the several monasteries, and other societies of monks and churchmen, would employ a portion of their idle time in teaching youth, and prosecuting their own studies; yet there is no proof that an authorized seat of learning, such as the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge, existed in England, until many hundred years after the time of Alfred."

_J. A. Giles, Life and Times of Alfred the Great, chapter 21._

EDUCATION: Saracenic and Moorish learning.

"Even as early as the tenth century, persons having a taste for learning and for elegant amenities found their way into Spain from all adjoining countries; a practice in subsequent years still more indulged in, when it became illustrated by the brilliant success of Gilbert, who … passed from the Infidel University of Cordova to the papacy of Rome. The khalifs of the West carried out the precepts of Ali, the fourth successor of Mohammed, in the patronage of literature. They established libraries in all their chief towns; it is said that not fewer than seventy were in existence. To every mosque was attached a public school, in which the children of the poor were taught to read and write, and instructed in the precepts of the Koran. For those in easier circumstances there were academies, usually arranged in twenty-five or thirty apartments, each calculated for accommodating four students; the academy being presided over by a rector. In Cordova, Granada, and other great cities, there were universities frequently under the superintendence of Jews; the Mohammedan maxim being that the real learning of a man is of more public importance than any particular religious opinions he may entertain. In this they followed the example of the Asiatic khalif, Haroun Alraschid, who actually conferred the superintendence of his schools on John Masué, a Nestorian Christian. The Mohammedan liberality was in striking contrast with the intolerance of Europe. … In the universities some of the professors of polite literature gave lectures on Arabic classical works; others taught rhetoric or composition, or mathematics, or astronomy. From these institutions many of the practices observed in our colleges were derived. They held Commencements, at which poems were read and orations delivered in presence of the public. They had also, in addition to these schools of general learning, professional ones, particularly for medicine. With a pride perhaps not altogether inexcusable, the Arabians boasted of their language as being the most perfect spoken by man. … It is not then surprising that, in the Arabian schools, great attention was paid to the study of language, and that so many celebrated grammarians were produced. By these scholars, dictionaries, similar to those now in use, were composed; their copiousness is indicated by the circumstance that one of them consisted of sixty volumes, the definition of each word being illustrated or sustained by quotations from Arab authors of acknowledged repute. They had also lexicons of Greek, Latin, Hebrew; and cyclopedias such as the Historical Dictionary of Sciences of Mohammed Ibn Abdallah, of Granada."

_J. W. Draper, History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, volume 2, chapter 2._

"The Saracenic kings formed libraries of unparalleled size and number. That of Hakem amounted to 600,000 volumes, of which 44 were employed in the mere catalogue. Upwards of 70 public libraries were established in his dominions. 100,000 volumes were numbered in the library of Cairo, and were freely lent to the studious citizen. The taste of the sovereign communicated itself to the subject, and a private doctor declared that his books were sufficient to load 400 camels. {691} Nor were the Saracens less attentive to the foundation of schools and colleges. Eighty of the latter institutions adorned Cordova in the reign of Hakem; in the fifteenth century fifty were scattered over the city and plain of Granada. 200,000 dinars (about £100,000 sterling) were expended on the foundation of a single college at Baghdad. It was endowed with an annual revenue of 15,000 dinars, and was attended by 6,000 students. The princes of the house of Omeya honoured the Spanish academies by their presence and studies, and competed, not without success, for the prizes of learning. Numerous schools for the purpose of elementary instruction were founded by a long series of monarchs. … In this manner the Arabians, within two centuries, constructed an apparatus for mental improvement which hitherto had not been equalled save in Alexandria, and to which the Church, after ruling the intellect of Europe for more than five hundred years, could offer no parallel."

_The Intellectual Revival of the Middle Ages (Westminster Review, January, 1876)._

EDUCATION: Scholasticism. Schoolmen.

In the later times of the Roman empire, "the loss of the dignity of political freedom, the want of the cheerfulness of advancing prosperity, and the substitution of the less philosophical structure of the Latin language for the delicate intellectual mechanism of the Greek, fixed and augmented the prevalent feebleness and barrenness of intellect. Men forgot, or feared, to consult nature, to seek for new truths, to do what the great discoverers of other times had done; they were content to consult libraries, to study and defend old opinions, to talk of what great geniuses had said. They sought their philosophy in accredited treatises, and dared not question such doctrines as they there found. … In the mean time the Christian religion had become the leading subject of men's thoughts; and divines had put forward its claims to be, not merely the guide of men's lives, and the means of reconciling them to their heavenly Master, but also to be a Philosophy in the widest sense in which the term had been used;—a consistent speculative view of man's condition and nature, and of the world in which he is placed. … It was held, without any regulating principle, that the philosophy which had been bequeathed to the world by the great geniuses of heathen antiquity, and the philosophy which was deduced from, and implied by, the Revelations made by God to man, must be identical; and, therefore, that Theology is the only true philosophy. … This view was confirmed by the opinion which prevailed, concerning the nature of philosophical truth; a view supported by the theory of Plato, the practice of Aristotle, and the general propensities of the human mind: I mean the opinion that all science may be obtained by the use of reasoning alone;—that by analyzing and combining the notions which common language brings before us, we may learn all that we can know. Thus Logic came to include the whole of Science; and accordingly this Abelard expressly maintained. … Thus a Universal Science was established, with the authority of a Religious Creed. Its universality rested on erroneous views of the relation of words and truth; its pretensions as a science were admitted by the servile temper of men's intellects; and its religious authority was assigned it, by making all truth part of religion. And as Religion claimed assent within her own jurisdiction under the most solemn and imperative sanctions, Philosophy shared in her imperial power, and dissent from their doctrines was no longer blameless or allowable. Error became wicked, dissent became heresy; to reject the received human doctrines, was nearly the same as to doubt the Divine declarations. The Scholastic Philosophy claimed the assent of all believers. The external form, the details, and the text of this Philosophy, were taken, in a great measure, from Aristotle; though, in the spirit, the general notions, and the style of interpretation, Plato and the Platonists had no inconsiderable share. … It does not belong to our purpose to consider either the theological or the metaphysical doctrines which form so large a portion of the treatises of the schoolmen. Perhaps it may hereafter appear, that some light is thrown on some of the questions which have occupied metaphysicians in all ages, by that examination of the history of the Progressive Sciences in which we are now engaged; but till we are able to analyze the leading controversies of this kind, it would be of little service to speak of them in detail. It may be noticed, however, that many of the most prominent of them refer to the great question, 'What is the relation between actual things and general terms?' Perhaps in modern times, the actual things would be more commonly taken as the point to start from; and men would begin by considering how classes and universals are obtained from individuals. But the schoolmen, founding their speculations on the received modes of considering such subjects, to which both Aristotle and Plato had contributed, travelled in the opposite direction, and endeavored to discover how individuals were deduced from genera and species;—what was 'the Principle of Individuation.' This was variously stated by different reasoners. Thus Bonaventura solves the difficulty by the aid of the Aristotelian distinction of Matter and Form. The individual derives from the Form the property of being something, and from the Matter the property of being that particular thing. Duns Scotus, the great adversary of Thomas Aquinas in theology, placed the principle of Individuation in 'a certain determining positive entity,' which his school called Hæcceity or 'thisness.' 'Thus an individual man is Peter, because his humanity is combined with Petreity.' The force of abstract terms is a curious question, and some remarkable experiments in their use had been made by the Latin Aristotelians before this time. In the same way in which we talk of the quantity and quality of a thing, they spoke of its 'quiddity.' We may consider the reign of mere disputation as fully established at the time of which we are now speaking [the Middle Ages]; and the only kind of philosophy henceforth studied was one in which no sound physical science had or could have a place."

_W. Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, book 4, chapter 4 (volume 1)._

"Scholasticism was philosophy in the service of established and accepted theological doctrines. … More particularly, Scholasticism was the reproduction of ancient philosophy under the control of ecclesiastical doctrine. … The name of Scholastics (doctores scholastici) which was given to the teachers of the septem liberales artes [seven liberal arts] (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, in the Trivium; arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, in the Quadrivium), or at least some of them, in the Cloister-Schools founded by Charlemagne, as also to teachers of theology, was afterwards given to all who occupied themselves with the sciences, and especially with philosophy. … Johannes Scotus, or Erigena [ninth century] is the earliest noteworthy philosopher of the Scholastic period. He was of Scottish nationality, but was probably born and brought up in Ireland. At the call of Charles the Bald he emigrated to France."

_F. Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, volume 1, pages 355-484._

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"Scholasticism, at the last, from the prodigious mental activity which it kept up, became a tacit universal insurrection against authority: it was the swelling of the ocean before the storm. … It was a sign of a great awakening of the human mind when theologians thought it both their duty and their privilege to philosophize. There was a vast waste of intellectual labor, but still it was intellectual labor, and, as we shall see, it was not in the end unfruitful."

_C. J. Stillé, Studies in Mediæval History, chapter 13._

"Scholasticism had its hour of glory, its erudite doctors, its eloquent professors, chief among whom was Abelard (1070-1142). … At a time when printing did not exist, when manuscript copies were rare, a teacher who combined knowledge with the gift of speech was a phenomenon of incomparable interest, and students flocked from all parts of Europe to take advantage of his lectures. Abelard is the most brilliant representative of the scholastic pedagogy, with an original and personal tendency towards the emancipation of the mind. 'It is ridiculous,' he said, 'to preach to others what we can neither make them understand nor understand ourselves.' With more boldness than Saint Anselm, he applied dialectics to theology, and attempted to reason out the grounds of his faith. The seven liberal arts constituted what may be called the secondary instruction of the Middle Age, such as was given in the claustral or conventual schools, and later, in the universities. The liberal arts were distributed into two courses of study, known as the 'trivium' and the 'quadrivium.' The 'trivium' comprised grammar (Latin grammar, of course), dialectics, or logic, and rhetoric; and the 'quadrivium,' music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. It is important to note the fact that this programme contains only abstract and formal studies,—no real and concrete studies. The sciences which teach us to know man and the world, such as history, ethics, the physical and natural sciences, were omitted and unknown, save perhaps in a few convents of the Benedictines. Nothing which can truly educate man, and develop his faculties as a whole, enlists the attention of the Middle Age. From a course of study thus limited there might come skillful reasoners and men formidable in argument, but never fully developed men. The methods employed in the ecclesiastical schools of the Middle Age were in accord with the spirit of the times, when men were not concerned about liberty and intellectual freedom; and when they thought more about the teaching of dogmas than about the training of the intelligence. The teachers recited or read their lectures, and the pupils learned by heart. The discipline was harsh. Corrupt human nature was distrusted. In 1363, pupils were forbidden the use of benches and chairs, on the pretext that such high seats were an encouragement to pride. For securing obedience, corporal chastisements were used and abused. The rod is in fashion in the fifteenth as it was in the fourteenth century. 'There is no other difference,' says an historian, 'except that the rods in the fifteenth century are twice as long as those in the fourteenth.'"

_G. Compayré, The History of Pedagogy, translated by W. H. Payne, chapter 4._

EDUCATION: Universities, Their Rise. Abelard.