CHAPTER III.

HUMANISTIC EDUCATION.

a

We have described the two principal educational systems
of the Pagan world. Whatever effects the introduction
of Christianity wrought, it was only to be expected that
it should bring about a great change in the character of
education. It recognised no difference between slave
and free, it gave women an honourable position by the
side of men, it considered the individual not as existing
only for the benefit of the State, but laid stress on the
personal relations between God and each of His creatures.
It did not regard education as mainly of political import-a
ance, but estimated it by its bearing on the development
of the spiritual life. It was natural that the Christian
education should take at first an ecclesiastical character.
The first pressing need was to provide ministrants of all
grades for the service of the Church, and it was only as a
favour that laymen were gradually allowed to partake of
this instruction. But even in the age of the Fathers we
find that the curriculum was not confined within these
narrow limits. The Greeks were more liberal in their
views than the Latins. The great Origen at Alexandria
added philosophy, geometry, grammar, and rhetoric to
the ecclesiastical course, and read with his pupils the

Greek philosophers and poets. He used the method of dialectic, and taught his pupils by questions and answers, and encouraged them to pursue inquiry on their own account. But the crown and completion of the edifice lay in the interpretation of Holy Scripture, and in the explanation of the subtlest truths of Christianity. This interpretation was no mere analysis of the dead letter, but an attempt to penetrate into the living spirit. On the other hand, the Latin Fathers Tertullian, Cyprian, Jerome, and Augustine would have nothing to do with the heathen writings. A new education, they said, must be formed of a purely Christian character to supply Christian

wants.

To the age of the Fathers succeeded the age of the Schoolmen, and to the period in which they flourished the education of the Middle Ages in the main belongs. We cannot give one uniform account of it as a whole. The education of the monastery was strongly contrasted with that of the castle, and these were again distinct from the education of the towns. These three streams continued to run parallel to each other until their course was profoundly modified by the combined effects of the Renaissance and the Reformation. It was part of the design of Charles the Great to establish throughout his empire a system of lay and ecclesiastical schools, which should supply the place of that magnificent system of public schools which had grown up under the Roman empire. He spared no trouble in obtaining the best assistance; the palace school was to be a model and an example to the rest. But he took education as he found it, and his work had no great influence on the development of educational theory. Very different was it with the monks. The great schools of Fulda, of Reichenau, of Corbey, of Hildesheim, of St. Gall, all monasteries of

The School of the Monastery.

37

the Benedictine rule, were not only centres of enlightenment to the ages in which they flourished, but they presented to the world a model of Christian education which it has never entirely deserted. Not a man in Europe now,' as Dr. Newman says, 'who talks bravely against the Church, but owes it to the Church that he can talk at all.' The Benedictines were, in education, the Jesuits of the Middle Ages, but they taught with more simplicity and faithfulness, and not with ulterior designs of power and influence. Their great monasteries were at once fortresses against crime, refuges for the oppressed, centres of instruction for the people, the free home of the sciences, archives of literature, schools for the young, universities for the learned, chanceries for kings, seminaries for priests, schools of agriculture, of manufacture, of music, architecture, and painting. Nor was the education of girls neglected. The nuns of St. Clare were as active in teaching as their brother monks.

'The school was organised with great care, and the curriculum was not nearly as narrow as we might have expected. The highest dignitary was the scholasticus, or provost, called in Italian magniscola. He was highly paid and much honoured, and exercised a general superintendence over the whole institution. Under him was the rector or head master, appointed and paid by the scholasticus. He might be a layman or be married. As the scholasticus withdrew more and more from teaching, the care of the higher education came gradually into the rector's hands. Another important officer was the cantor, or singing master, who had also charge of the elaborate church calendar. The immediate care of the pupils was committed both in and out of school to circatores, who answer to the French maitres d'études, a class happily unknown in England. The subjects of education were

the so-called seven liberal arts: Grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy. The use of these was expressed in the following verses.

Gramm loquitur, Dia vera docet, Rhe verba colorat,
Mus canit, Ar numerat, Geo ponderat, As colit astra.

The three first formed the trivium, the four last the quadrivium-the whole making a course of seven years. The study of religion, although not expressly mentioned, was regarded as the object and the completion of the whole system.

Grammar, principally Latin, although Greek and Hebrew were also taught to some extent, was imparted out of the works of Priscian, Diomedes, and Donatus. It went as far as the explanation of some of the best known writers, and the learning of prosody, etymology, and correctness of expression. This was the germ from which the later humanistic education was developed. The scholars of the Reformation elaborated and perfected this first of the liberal studies, but there they stopped, and even in these days we hesitate to go beyond them. Charles the Great did his best to develop the study of his native German. Dialectic was in theory synonymous with logic, but in the schools of the Middle Ages it went little beyond a collection of barren terminologies, borrowed from Aristotle after passing through a number of incongruous media. When the application of philosophy to theology was perfected by the Schoolmen, this branch encroached largely on the field of education, and so discredited that study that it found no place in the new learning. Rhetoric was taught out of Quintilian and Cicero; sometimes from their original works, sometimes through the medium of Capella, Bede, or Alcuin. Music, as might be expected, occupied a large space. With it

were connected other arts of taste--the beautiful writing of manuscripts, architecture, and illumination. Arithmetic was too much taken up with the secret properties of numbers; Geometry was taught entirely out of Euclid, and was connected with elementary notions of geography. Astronomy, in some respects hardly distinguishable from astrology, was the only branch of natural science which received attention. Even here the connection of education with the Church was not forgotten. Twenty-four doggerel Latin verses taught the sequence of the festivals of the Church; they were called Cisio-Janus from the two words with which they commence. These two lines

have reference to January.

Cisio-Janus, Epi sibi vindicat Oc Feli Mar An

Prisca. Fab, Ag. Vincenti. Pau. Pol. Car. nobile lumen.

The days of the month are denoted by the order in which the syllables occur. Cisio is the circumcision of Christ. Epi, the sixth syllable, is the Epiphany on the 6th of January. Pau, the twenty-fifth syllable, is the conversion of St. Paul on the 25th of January.

The discipline in these schools was very harsh and rough, and the rod was the only means of persuasion. The flogging which still disgraces some of our public schools is an inheritance from the monks and friars. This harsh treatment brought with it its natural results: the pupils grew up unruly and ill-behaved. We hear of schoolboys murdering each other, and of a cloister being burnt down in revenge for a flogging. In these religious schools. grew up the practice of acting plays and mysteries by way of relaxation, which has continued in Catholic and Protestant schools to our own day. We have before mentioned the name of Charles the Great. The wish of the emperor was to establish throughout his vast empire,