WHAT AND HOW WAS TEACHED IN A MEDIEVAL SCHOOL.
Comparative table of education in the schools of Byzantium and Western Europe
Byzantium: Greek languageSchool motto:Teacher do not spare your students for mistakes; “human nature is sinful, and corporal punishment contributes to the purification and salvation of the soul.”
School motto“Read a lot and learn a lot. If you don't understand, don't despair. Having read the book more than once, you will gain knowledge, you will understand it from God. And what you do not know, ask those who know and do not be proud ... It is extremely important to study and understand the nature of things and act properly.
By the 7th century, schools of the ancient type had completely disappeared in medieval Europe. School business in the young barbarian states of the 5th - 7th centuries. turned out to be in a deplorable state. Illiteracy and ignorance reigned everywhere. Illiterate were many kings and the top of society - to know and officials. Meanwhile, the need for literate subjects and clergy was constantly increasing. The Catholic Church tried to correct the existing situation.
A high culture of home education is a characteristic feature of Byzantine life. Of course, the upbringing of children was especially taken care of in families with a high social status, but in the families of artisans, children learned to write and read if their parents were literate.
The bulk of the population did not receive even a minimum education in schools. Children were brought up by their parents in the family and in everyday work.
In Byzantium, there were no social restrictions on education, and everyone who wanted and had the opportunity to study could attend schools.
They wrote on a wax tablet, and then on parchment.
In medieval Europe, there were three main types of church schools:parochial schools, monastic schools, episcopal (cathedral)
The main purpose of all types of schools was to train the clergy.
In monastic schools, at the initial stage, they taught for 3 years:
Memorized prayers and religious chants
Learned the Latin alphabet
Read prayers and texts in Latin
Mastered the letter
Education in church schools of an advanced level was taught according to the program of seven liberal arts for 12-13 years.
One of the first to formulate such a program for medieval Europe was Severinus Boethius (480-524). "Seven Liberal Arts" He unitedarithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music (sciences based on mathematical laws) in educational th cycle "quadrium" (fourth way). This cycle, together with the "trivium" (third way) - grammar, rhetoric, dialectics - subsequently laid the foundation for all medieval education+ THEOLOGY - church teaching about God and divine deeds.
Teaching methods were based on memorization and the development of mechanical memory. The most common teaching method was catechetical (question-answer), with the help of which the teacher introduced abstract knowledge that was subject to mandatory memorization, without explaining the object or phenomenon. For example, “What is the moon? – The eye of the night, the distributor of dew, the prophet of storms, ... What is autumn? - Yearly granary, etc.
Astronomy was an applied science associated with the calculations of numerous church holidays.
Music taught with the help of notes, indicated using the letters of the alphabet for church hymns.
Arithmetic program
Geometry- a science that studies the regularities of flat objects in space.
Rhetoric - it is the art of thinking, speaking competently and beautifully.
Dialectics
Grammar
Worship -
Astronomy was an applied science associated with the calculations of numerous church holidays.
Music was taught with the help of notes, indicated using the letters of the alphabet for church hymns.
Arithmetic program meant mastering the four arithmetic operations. Teaching arithmetic was too complicated, the calculations took up entire pages. Therefore, there was an honorary title of "doctor of the abacus" (i.e., "doctor of multiplication and division"). All academic subjects were given a religious and mystical character.
Geometry-science, studying the patterns of flat objects in space.
Wrote on paper with a quill
At the first stage of education - in literacy schools - children received an elementary education. The course of study, as a rule, lasted 2–3 years, and children began to study from the age of 5–7. From 7-10 years old.
Elementary schools for most children were the first and last stage of organized education.
However, in the methodology of teaching literacy, the practice of the previous era was preserved: students were taught by the subjunctive method with the obligatory pronunciation of what was written aloud, “in chorus”. First, students memorized letters, then syllables in all their diversity, and only after that they began to read whole words and sentences. The method of memorizing texts by heart dominated.
The reliance on memory learning was justified at that time for the reason that the language of the school and the book was different from the spoken Greek. In school education, traditional texts of ancient schools (Homer, fables, etc.) were used, supplemented by the Psalter and the lives of Christian saints.
There were practically no changes in teaching counting: first, counting on the fingers, then pebbles were used, then - a counting board - an abacus.
Primary education lacked the physical preparation of children, and music was replaced by church singing.
Didascalus is a school teacher.
Grammar school. 10-16 years old (5-6 years old)
The school day of the Byzantine schoolchild began with the reading of prayers . One of them has been preserved: “Lord Jesus Christ, open the ears and eyes of my heart, so that I understand your word and learn to do your will.”
In Byzantium, it was believed that every educated "Roma", as the Byzantines called themselves, should own"Hellenic Science" opening the way to higher philosophy - theology. Greater attention was paid to grammar, rhetoric, dialectics and poetics.
Rhetoric is the art of thinking, speaking competently and beautifully.
Dialectics - the art of arguing and reasoning
Poetics - a science that studies the laws of literature, the construction of poetic works and the works themselves.
Grammar - a science that studies the change of words and their combination in a sentence.
The "mathematical quaternary" - arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy - was studied by a few in Byzantium. Ultimately, the goal of education was to form a common culture and eloquence among the youth, to develop thinking. An important means of learning was the competition of schoolchildren with each other in the interpretation of texts and rhetoric.
The teaching methods in higher schools were traditional: the teacher read, gave interpretations, asked students questions, answered students' questions, and organized discussions. School education was aimed at teaching children active language skills, developing their ability to retell, quote texts from memory, give descriptions, and improvise. Pupils composed speeches, comments on texts, gave descriptions of art monuments, improvised on an arbitrary theme, etc.
Mastering the art of interpretation required from the students a sufficiently broad knowledge in the field of ancient and biblical history, geography, mythology, etc. As a result, those who graduated from school should have had a fairly good knowledge of the content of Homer's Iliad, the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Hesiod, Pindar, Theocritus, as well as the Bible, the works of the "fathers of the church" - Augustine, John Chrysostom, Gregory the Theologian, John of Damascus and etc.
Didascalus, with the help of a senior student, checked the knowledge of students at the end of the school week. Failure in studies and violation of discipline according to the Hellenistic tradition were punished with rods.
After comparing the main characteristics of education, children are offered the task of creating their own schedule, choosing the school that is closer to them in spirit.
Schedule of lessons in ________________________________________
COUNTING BOARD ABAK
During the Middle Ages, there were three types of schools. The lower schools, formed at churches and monasteries, aimed to prepare elementary literate clerics - clergy. Their main attention was paid to the study of the Latin language (in which Catholic worship was conducted), prayers and the very order of worship. In the secondary school, which arose most often at the episcopal chairs, the study of the seven "liberal arts" was practiced (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, or logic, arithmetic, geometry, which included geography, astronomy and music). The first three sciences constituted the so-called trivium, the last four - the quadrivium. Later, the study of "liberal arts" began to be carried out in higher education, where these disciplines formed the content of teaching at the junior ("artistic") faculty. The higher school was first called Studia Generalia (literally - general sciences), then this name was replaced by another - universities.
The first universities arose in the 12th century - partly from episcopal schools that had the most prominent professors in the field of theology and philosophy, partly from associations of private teachers - specialists in philosophy, law (Roman law) and medicine. The most ancient university in Europe is the University of Paris, which existed as a “free school” in the first half of the 12th and at the beginning of the 13th century (the founding charter of Philip II August 1200 on the rights of the Sorbonne). However, as early as the 11th century, Italian higher schools began to play the role of university centers - the Bologna Law School, which specialized in Roman law, and the Salerno School of Medicine. The most typical University of Paris, whose charter formed the basis of other universities in Europe, consisted of four faculties: artistic, medical, legal and theological (which included the teaching of philosophy in church illumination).
Other oldest universities in Europe were Oxford and Cambridge in England, Salamanca in Spain and Neapolitan in Italy, founded in the 13th century. In the XIV century, universities were founded in the cities of Prague, Krakow, Heidelberg. In the 15th century, their numbers increased rapidly. In 1500 there were already 65 universities throughout Europe.
Teaching in medieval universities was conducted in Latin. The main method of university teaching was the lectures of professors. A common form of scientific communication was also disputes, or public disputes, arranged periodically on topics of a theological and philosophical nature. The discussions were attended mainly by university professors. But disputes were also arranged for scholars (scholars - students, from the word Schola - school).
DIDACTICS OF THE MIDDLE AGES
Historical and pedagogical characteristics of the early Middle Ages
The existence of a pedagogical tradition in the Middle Ages, as well as in other historical periods, the formation of pedagogical ideas, the implementation of the educational process are associated with the structural and functional structure of society, the type of social inheritance of the subjects of the educational process. The pedagogy of the Middle Ages has characteristic features, since, firstly, the pedagogical traditions of this era are not closed in time, they have their own historical past, well-established in their influences on modern Western European pedagogy. Secondly, a person of the Middle Ages defined himself not with ethnicity, but with a local one (village, city, family), as well as on a confessional basis, i.e. belonging to the ministers of the church or the laity. Both in the educational material and in the organization of special educational institutions there is a synthesis of reality with the new needs of society. The ideal of medieval education is the rejection of a comprehensively developed personality of the era of Antiquity, the formation of a Christian person. The new ideal of education defined the main European pedagogical tradition early medieval (V-X centuries) - the Christian tradition, which also determined the educational system of the era.
Types of educational institutions of the early Middle Ages
The beginning of Christian schools was laid by monasteries and associated with the school catechumens, where training and education were reduced to the study of Christian dogmas, leading to faith, preparation for the righteous search for "Christian birth" before baptism on Easter.
The main types of church schools were: parish, monastic, cathedral, or episcopal (cathedral). As such, there was no strict gradation in terms of the level of education of schools, but still there were some differences between them.
parochial school- this is an elementary (small) school, which was located at the church and gave basic knowledge to 3-10 students in the field of religion, church chanting, reading in Latin, and where counting and writing were sometimes taught. The only and main teachers were: the deacon or deacon, the scholastic or didascal, the magniscola, who were supposed to teach all the sciences. If the number of students increased, then the circulator specially observed the discipline.
Monastic schools developed in close connection with episcopal schools that prepared successors for the diocesan clergy. The disciples gathered in circles around the bishop, receiving deep religious knowledge. So, the teaching rules of St. Benedict of Nursia (480-533) contained the requirement to read for three hours a day, and during fasting to read a whole book. The Benedictine school of the early Middle Ages is part of a whole complex of institutions with missionary tasks, where the problems of teaching secular sciences were also solved. The school was divided into schola claustri, or interior,- for monastic youth and schola canonica, or exterior,- for secular youth. The meaning of the old motto of the monks of the Benedictine order was that the fortress of the order, its salvation and glory are in its schools. The people who led education during this period belonged to this order. The educational activity of Albin Alcuin (735 - 804) went far beyond the scope of this era, since his monastic school in Tours was a "hotbed of teaching" until the 12th century. The abbey in Monte Cassino, where the center of the Benedictine order was located, is also famous for the fact that the outstanding theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) later studied here. By the 16th century in the countries of Western Europe, there were about 37,000 monasteries belonging to the Benedictine order and orders descending from it (every fifth of them had a monastic school). In these schools the teachers were, as a rule, monks or priests who taught the children at fixed hours. The main subjects were the same as in parish schools, but later this circle expanded significantly, including rhetoric, religious philosophy, grammar, and, in some schools, quadrivium disciplines. In monastic schools, much attention was paid to copying books, due to which a library appeared in the monastery. The sages of that time said that a monastery without a library, that a fortress without protection.
From episcopal schools to the Middle Ages develop cathedral and cathedral school, in which there were also internal cenobitic schools for the younger generation - the clergy - and open schools (for the laity), the former having an educational character, and the latter educational. Schools of this type were considered elevated, since they were located in large church centers, where the full range of medieval sciences was taught - the “seven free sciences” (lat. septem artes liberales). In order to strengthen church authority and spiritual education, in 1215 the Council decided: to establish the position of teacher of grammar and theology at all cathedrals. Bishops were instructed to pay special attention to the education of youth, and bishops were to exercise control over all diocesan parish schools.
The order of the Council read: “Since the schools serve to prepare all those who will subsequently be in charge of secular and spiritual affairs in the state and the church, we command that in all cities and villages of our diocese the parish schools should be restored again where they are fell into decay, and where they still survived, developed more and more. To this end, parish priests, magisters, and respected members of society should see to it that the teachers, who are usually appointed kisters in the villages, are provided with the necessary maintenance. And the school should be set up in a suitable house near the parish church, so that, on the one hand, it would be easier for the pastor and noble parishioners to observe the teacher, and on the other hand, it would be more convenient to accustom students to religious exercises ... who settled in the parish under fear of a fine of 12 marks were obliged to send their children to school, so that paganism, still smoldering in many hearts, would completely die out, ”and a report was to be submitted to the pastor every month on“ how the students succeed in Christian manners, writing and reading, and grow day by day in the fear of God, so that in the course of time they avoid evil and become more and more established in good. In theological schools in the Middle Ages, the laity were presented as both students and teachers, so this period does not distinguish between schools according to the direction of their educational activities. Lay teachers mainly introduced students to the seven liberal arts, Roman law, and medicine.
Christian educational institutions are characterized by the following features:
1) having a religious and moral ultimate goal, they were not only an educational type of institution, but also an educational one;
2) Christian education was combined with the teaching of writing, reading, singing;
3) due to their connection with the monasteries, the schools were not estate, private, national and were of a public (mass) character.
In 313, when Christianity acquired the status of an official religion, the Christian communities were faced with the need to create church schools in order to spread the doctrine. In Europe of the early Christian period, there are almost no secular schools that have survived from late Antiquity. The church became the only center that contributed to the dissemination of knowledge, and the sacred teaching was the duty of the ministers of the church.
Naturally, the content of Christian education differed from secular and professional, knowledge had a pronounced religious orientation. Having become dominant, the church had to answer many questions in the field of education, including accepting or not accepting the pedagogical heritage of Antiquity.
In the period of the early Middle Ages, pedagogy rethinks the ancient heritage in education and introduces its own values - a guide to spiritual education, education by faith. Until the VI century. Christians received a grammatical and rhetorical education, the medieval pedagogical tradition inherited the language of ancient Rome from the previous era, and from the moment the Bible was translated into Latin, when church services began to be conducted in Latin, this language becomes common European and mandatory for learning. Of course, humanity could not reject the scientific achievements of the previous era, so the main dispute arose about the means and ways of comprehending secular knowledge by a Christian.
During the Middle Ages knowledge of human experience was carried out by giving it a divine manifestation, was based on the idea of the thinkers of this era that all existing reality in the world is distributed according to the degree of proximity to God. But there were others demarcation signs mastery of knowledge: according to the degree of divinity of knowledge; by the quality of the cognitive process (the need to include not only mental operations, but also physical activity, including in the form of fasting, obedience, etc.); according to the level of preparedness of the student and teacher for learning; on a corporate - social basis; by gender and age, etc.
A characteristic feature of the content of education in the early Middle Ages was its emotional and symbolic character. With the help of the studied material, the teacher had to create a positive emotional mood of the process of cognition, so that the divine sphere of the student's soul was in tune with the divine meanings of the cognizable. Indicative in this case is the study of the Greek letter Y (upsilon), since this letter was a symbol of all human life. From birth to a conscious choice of a future path, a person moves from below in a straight line, and then follows the chosen path, where the left straight line is a wide and comfortable road of sin, and the right one, on the contrary, is a thorny path, the path of the righteous. In other words, the process of cognition was carried out in the whole complex of religious semantic meanings, symbols and allegories directed to the divine limits. An early medieval teacher told his student: "Wherever possible, combine faith with reason." From here purpose of education in the era of the early Middle Ages - the discipline of free will and reason and bringing a person with its help to faith, to comprehend and worship God and serve him.
Thus, the content of education had a dual focus: providing certain information and developing the spiritual intentions of the student. In the study of secular sciences, those useful were selected that were created by God for the life of people or were piously invented by people themselves and that did not harm the main thing - education in the spirit of virtue and the fear of God. In the Middle Ages, the problem arises of choosing book or extra-book learning, the correlation of the role and significance of the word (reading, grammar, writing, etc.) with operational knowledge (craft, science, art, etc.), as well as ways to comprehend the incomprehensible to end of God. Thanks to verbal and book learning, the educational program of the theologian Aurelius Augustine (Blessed) (354 - 430), including the study of languages, rhetoric, dialectics, mathematics, there was an active development of church culture, an awareness of the need to assimilate church dogma by every Christian, i.e. The Western European pedagogical tradition defined the range of sciences, without which a person cannot develop and strengthen the Faith. First, a person had to master the basic skills of learning (reading, writing and counting), and then move on to comprehend the "seven liberal arts", the trivium of the verbal and quadrivium of mathematical sciences, as well as theology, theology and philosophy.
Education, as already noted, in the countries of Western Europe was conducted in Latin, there were no time frames for education. The only criterion for a student's transition to another level of education was the degree to which he mastered the material being studied.
The process of education began with memorization Psalter, because it was believed that the knowledge and repetition of psalms lead a person away from "unnecessary" vain thoughts, which was a necessary condition for the internal mood of children to comprehend the dogma, understanding the Bible.
Actually, the study of the "seven free arts" began with mastering latin grammar, which was considered the guide of the student to the world of sciences. The purpose of studying this art is to correctly read and understand the Holy Scriptures, to correctly express one's own thoughts.
Rhetoric and dialectic, on the one hand, they taught the child to compose and deliver sermons, and on the other hand, they formed the ability to think logically, argue convincingly and argue, which also made it possible to avoid errors in dogma.
Mastering the highest level of education was given special importance due to the fact that this block of disciplines affirmed the dynamic perception of the “Divine Cosmos” based on the world of numbers by a person. When learning arithmetic four mathematical operations were mastered, and the interpretation of numbers was inextricably linked with the symbols of faith. So, the unit corresponded with the symbol of the one God, the two - with the symbol of the duality of Jesus Christ (Divine and human), the number three - this is the Holy Trinity, etc. Geometry supplemented its content with the 7 course of arithmetic, since it was considered as a science about the structure of the world around with the help of numbers. They also sought a philosophical basis in music, believing that it brings the heavenly and earthly spheres into harmony. Astronomy was considered as a science, also in the service of the church, since it was engaged in the calculation and calculation of church holidays, fasts.
In cathedral schools, the crowning achievement of education was the comprehension philosophy, which completed the course of the "seven free arts" and led to the comprehension of theology, mastery of the wisdom of symbolic analogies, comprehension of the picture of the world.
Considering pedagogical process in the era of the early Middle Ages, it is necessary to highlight its main trends and characteristic features:
1. The main way of learning is apprenticeship. The pedagogical tradition of mentorship in religious education manifested itself in the form of apprenticeship of a monk, a clergyman with God; in secular education (knightly, craft), the child was a student of the master. The main form of work with the student was individual work on the transfer of knowledge and instructions.
2. The high role of verbal and book learning. The structure of the content of education, its orientation are connected with the comprehension of two worlds by a person: heavenly and earthly. This mutual influence is expressed in the fact that, comprehending the real world, mastering the sciences of the earth, a person moves to the Highest wisdom, where there is the harmony of music, the arithmetic of heaven and the grammar of the Bible. But the whole world was created by the Divine Word, which is embodied in the holy book - the Bible. Learning helps to master the Truth of the Word. Logical and grammatical education was one of the tasks of education, hence the verbal (catechetical - question-and-answer) method of teaching as the main one, i.e. verbal teaching, or learning the Word.
3.Development of the student's memory since any kind of distortion of the Holy Text, quoted treatises of the Fathers of the Church, canons, theological writings were unacceptable. The universal teaching method was the memorization of samples and their reproduction. Already in early Christian pedagogy, it was proposed to use the mechanisms of associative memory, correlating the content of the text with its location, pattern, place of memorization, etc. Memory served the student as a library.
4. The basic principle of education is authoritarianism. To a greater extent, severity, punishments were used to educate a Christian person in the "fear of God", which will ensure, firstly, the development of Reason and Faith, and secondly, the ascent to the comprehension of Truth and Wisdom. The fear of God and love are considered by the Fathers of the Church in interconnection, since the disciplined will, through Fear, destroys pride that interferes with the reverence of the Lord: “Teach not rage, not cruelty, not anger, but joyfully visible fear and loving custom, sweet teaching and affectionate reasoning.”
5. The main means of teaching and educating a child is the family world. The foundations for the development of the child were laid in the family, which was a visual aid for labor education, the formation of religious beliefs, and for initial socialization.
6. The interaction between the teacher and the student in the learning process was based on the understanding that the main teacher is God. At the same time, both the student and the teacher were aware of this fact, so the Divine principle was considered the main source of education.
7. Didactic instruction in the comprehension of the Divine Mysteries. This applied to any science studied. The universality of knowledge consisted in the fact that it was necessary to comprehend the contradiction that arises between the Divine unity of the world and the diversity of the surrounding reality. This was the phenomenon of the need to acquire encyclopedic knowledge.
8.Inclusion in the educational process of visibility. Teaching reading was carried out by a difficult letter-subjunctive method. They learned to read from the abetsedary - a manual resembling a primer. Students of this stage of education were also called abetsedarii. The sounds of speech, deposited in the children's memory, were depicted, which helped the students to connect the sound and the letter. The main aids in teaching grammar were the treatises of the thinkers of early Christianity, Antiquity, as well as the textbook by Donat Alcuin, from which the teacher read the texts, and the students, writing them on the tablets, memorized and retold. It is known that students started dictionaries, where there was a translation from Latin, and also visual material was used in the form of an image of a person, on whose body parts verbs were inscribed.
In the Middle Ages, childhood ended at the age of seven. At this age, children began to take part in handicraft production and became apprentices, workers and maids. Seven-year-old orphans had to provide for themselves from this age. Only girls, if their parents were not too poor, could stay at home and prepare for the role of a future wife and mistress.
The basics of reading, writing and counting, if it came to that at all, the children were taught by their parents. Only the offspring of patricians and aristocrats - most often sons, but sometimes daughters - were taught by private teachers or teachers at school.
In the villages, the schools were public, with an elementary curriculum based on the Bible. In cities in the 15th century, there were three types of schools. First of all, theological schools at cathedrals and monasteries, where the future clergy were trained. In addition, secular education was also provided in monastic schools. The main subjects were grammar, rhetoric, music, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and religion.
An alternative to these schools were the so-called Latin schools, where only boys were admitted. Here all subjects were taught only in Latin. Even personal conversations, students, under the threat of a fine, had to conduct only in Latin. Such schools were under the jurisdiction of the city council, which took care of the school and the teachers. The teachers were clerics or ordinary people whose knowledge was not tested.
The third option was writing and counting schools. Merchants' children usually studied in such institutions, and three or four years of education for girls were also supposed to be there.
"Devil's well" on the church of St. Lawrence, Nuremberg. The devil takes away a schoolboy, below there is a book and a table for writing.
Children started going to school at the age of six. Parents tried to sweeten the first time at the desk with the help of bagels, raisins, figs, almonds, which they gave with them.
Classes lasted, depending on the length of daylight hours, up to 12 hours. In the summer, lessons began at five in the morning and ended at five in the evening.
In addition to teachers, numerous assistants worked in schools. The children were divided into groups, the transfer from one group to another took place four times a year. Schoolchildren, like teachers, were obliged not only to be present at school, but also at church services.
Corporal punishment was part of the training. Children were not only lavishly whipped, but also forced to kneel for hours on peas, at the pillory, carry heavy logs, drink dirty water, or eat from a dog bowl.
Martin Luther recalls his school days thus:
The schoolmaster takes out a rod from a bucket of water, beats and whips the poor varmint on the behind; he yells so that he can be heard through three houses, until blisters appear and blood flows. Many stewards are such evil devils that they wrap wire around rods, turn the rod over and beat with a thick end. They also wind their hair around a cane, and they beat and drag children so that even stones beg for mercy.
Speculum humane vite. Augsburg, 1488
Sometimes schoolchildren were even maimed by beatings. But, as Abelard wrote in the 12th century: "He who pities the rod, hates his son."
The rods should always be kept in sight: they usually hung on the wall.
At this age, children are more inclined towards evil than good, so they should be kept in check. Use the opportunity to punish small children, but do not be too zealous. Frequent but not strong punishments are good for young children. Double the punishment if they deny their guilt, make excuses, or avoid punishment. And this should be done not only until three, four or five years old, but, if necessary, until twenty-five.
The monk Giovanni Dominici wrote in the 15th century.
However, there were also humanists. Another Italian, the 15th century poet Guarino da Verona stated:
“The teacher should not beat the student to force him to study. This only repels the free youth and causes disgust for learning. The students are thus insulted mentally and intellectually, the teachers are deceived, and the punishment does not achieve its goal at all. The teacher’s best assistant is friendliness. Punishment should be resorted to only in extreme cases.
Unfortunately, his words were not successful until the middle of the 20th century.
Unlike boys, girls, unless they came from noble families, received no intellectual education. The merchant Paolo da Certaldo in the 14th century well formulated the opinion of his contemporaries
See to it that the boy learns to read at the age of six or seven. When it comes to a girl, send her to the kitchen, and do not sit her down with books. Girls don't need to be able to read if you don't want her to become a nun."
Mary Magdalene with a book, 1435
Parents unanimously sought to instill in girls the most important virtue: obedience to men - fathers and future husbands. Literacy and counting only harmed the girls, and the ability to weave and sew was also encouraged among girls from wealthy families. The main concern of parents was to keep their daughters chaste.
However, by the 15th century the situation had changed. Girls were also expected to be able to read and write by a certain age. The famous Nuremberg lawyer and diplomat Christoph Scheurl took up the seven-year-old girl Anna. When by the age of thirteen she still could not "pray, read and weave," Scheurl gave her to another family, because there was nothing more he could do to help her.
Especially women from merchant families had to be able to read and write, since they often conducted business correspondence and controlled the money circulation. For everyday affairs, literacy was also necessary: to record purchases and expenses.
Possession of arithmetic in the 16th century helped Sabina Welserin in her high-profile divorce proceedings with the Nuremberg merchant Linhard Hirsvogel: she independently calculated and provided the court with the amount that her ex-husband had to pay her.
Women often owned personal libraries: first handwritten, then printed.
In the late Middle Ages, girls in Nuremberg went to accounting schools, although the number of schoolgirls was less than schoolchildren. The aristocrat Behaim paid in advance for schooling at the hospital of the Holy Spirit for his daughters Sabina and Magdalena: the eldest was then five years old, the youngest four years old. At first, children were taught to write on tablets, and only when they knew how to use ink confidently were they allowed to write on paper. The Behaims paid for their daughters' education until the age of ten, at which time girls usually stopped studying.
Women were allowed to teach in schools, but only to younger children or exclusively to girls. Entry to the university or to the Latin school was closed to girls.
The knight hands the book to his daughters. Engraving by Albrecht Dürer, 1493
An excerpt from Philippe Aries's book The Child and Family Life under the Old Order.
It is impossible to properly understand the peculiarities of former school mores, even at the very end of the Old Order, without having an idea of what education was like in the Middle Ages. Undoubtedly, the humanistic ideas of the Renaissance had a greater influence on the programs and culture of the acquisition and transmission of knowledge than the Middle Ages. However, the life of a schoolboy within the walls of the school and outside it for a very long time, until the beginning of the 19th century, depended on the traditions that were formed in the Middle Ages. These traditions were formed in a world that is not so easy for a modern person to imagine, since the medievalists, having rather carefully studied the corporate organization of universities, the development of philosophical ideas in the university community, did not pay any attention to the conditions for the existence of the school and the school environment.
In order to formulate the features of the medieval school, one should first find out the history of its origin, and then try to understand what it became in the course of history, since the phenomenon is more clearly characterized by the sequence of other phenomena generated by it than by its origins. We will open the veil over some aspects of the life of the medieval school, which will help us in covering our story.
The origins are well known. It is indisputable that in Italy some law and private schools trace their origin directly to Roman antiquity. It is also known that in Byzantium the old, ancient system of education continued to exist and develop. This system, as shown by Marrou (the famous French historian), retained its secular character even in the theocratic Christianized Byzantium. Continuing the Hellenistic tradition, education was divided into levels, correlated with our primary, secondary and higher education. However, in the Gallo-Roman areas, the educational institutions and teaching methods of the late empire disappeared. We do not take into account those works of Latin authors that were not known in the Middle Ages, but subsequently re-entered the curricula, since they had no influence on the content of education. In this section, we state a complete gap between the medieval and ancient schools.
The medieval school came out of the need to prepare for the adoption of the holy orders. The church once entrusted the liberal education of its students to a secular school of the Hellenistic type. This education was necessary for them to receive the light of divine knowledge in the conditions of bookish, learned religion, the religion of Scripture and patristic commentaries, which Christianity very soon became. Starting from the 5th century, however, the church can no longer resort to the help of this traditional system, which goes into the past along with ancient culture and degrades with the decline of the urban lifestyle - the ancient school belonged to the city and did not take root in the countryside. However, the church service still requires a minimum of knowledge, some can be called literary - knowledge of church service texts, others scientific - calculating the floating dates of sacred holidays, and others artistic - church singing. Without this, it would be impossible to celebrate mass and celebrate the sacraments - and church life would have died out. There was a need for the clergy themselves, especially the bishops (sometimes in countries such as Ireland and England - monasteries), to ensure the education of young clerics. In contrast to the ancient tradition, this education was given directly in the church itself, and for a long time they said: a juventute in ista ecclesia nutritus, - in gremio sancte matris ecclesie ab annis puerilibus enutritus (lat. About youth, fed in it, - in the bosom of the holy mother nurtured church), where the church is understood not only as a community, but also as a place - a churchyard or a side chapel.
Thus, ecclesiastical education was professional or specialized in nature. Mister Marrou will say: "School for choristers." In the church they studied what was necessary for the service and singing - the Psalter, canonical prayers, of course, in Latin, and, of course, the Latin of the manuscripts that contained these texts. It should also be added that the teaching was oral and appealed to the memory of the students, as today in the schools of the Koran in Muslim countries: whoever was present at least once at the reading of the verses of the Koran in the mosque, can easily imagine a lesson in a medieval school. Such it was at its inception in the VI century, it remained the same until the beginning of modern history and even later. The students in chorus repeated the phrase proposed by the teacher - until they memorized it. The priests could recite almost all the prayers used during the service as a keepsake. So the ability to read ceased to be a mandatory tool for learning. It served only as an aid to memory in the event that a text was forgotten or an inaccuracy was made. Reading made it possible to "recognize" what one already knew, and not to discover something new, so the value of the reading skill itself was greatly reduced.
This specialized education was given mainly in cathedrals under the direction of the bishops and for the clergy of the parishes under their control. Soon the teaching passed into the hands of their assistants, who later became rivals, the canons of the chapter. However, the cathedrals of the late Middle Ages ordered the abbots of new village churches to take care of the education of successors themselves, that is, to teach them canonical singing, Psalms and services. Indeed, priests in one or another church were appointed in those days not by the bishop, as today, but by the masters, and the rural clergy did not necessarily study at the cathedral school. Here you can see the roots of the village school, unknown to the ancient world.
To the extent that the village school existed during the early Middle Ages, it did not rise above elementary knowledge. However, the cathedral school undergoes changes during the Carolingian era and eventually becomes the seed from which the Western education system has grown. The teaching of the Psalter and singing will occupy not the last place - the features of the "school for chanters" are preserved, and often the canon of the chapter, the "scholastic", who is often in charge of the school, is at the same time the cantor. Meanwhile, new disciplines appear in the program - nothing more than the free arts of Latin culture, the heir to the Hellenistic culture - returned to Gaul from Italy, where they, apparently, were never forgotten in private schools, as well as from England or Ireland, where this tradition was preserved in monasteries. From now on, in medieval schools, the teaching of the Psalter and singing will be supplemented by the study of the arts, the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics) and the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music), and, finally, theology, that is, Scripture and canon law. It also happens that the priest-teacher (“scholastic”) is often replaced by his subordinates, one at the elementary level (Psalter), representing something like an elementary school teacher, others reading different sections of the arts, theology or law. This specialization has not yet been universally established and is observed only in those schools that have achieved a certain fame, and therefore attracted teachers and students even from distant places, as was the case in Chartres or Paris. Most likely, most cathedral schools existed for a long time, with only two or three teachers who taught most of the subjects, at least the arts. But since the XII century, these schools are not enough. Chapters are forced to allow all other churches to have their own school. They have to allow private teaching, and the discontent with which they went to this causes a reaction in the form of an association of students and teachers directed against them - the university. Little by little, in the 12th century, an extensive network of schools was created, some of which later developed into universities, others remained at a more modest level.
If the ancient and medieval schools are separated by a large gap, then the transition from the medieval school to the modern way of teaching is smooth and almost imperceptible. Comparison of the two systems seems at first a monstrous anachronism, but it must be admitted that this is actually inevitable. Reading texts and documents concerning medieval teaching, we are always tempted to compare medieval mores with ours, since there is no other way to imagine the former.
First of all, the differences are striking. The medieval school was intended only for the owners of tonsure - clerics and monks. At the end of the Middle Ages, it also opened up for the laity, from that time gradually becoming available to ever wider sections of the population. However, until the middle of the XVIII century, it remains Latin. When it finally becomes French and students are no longer punished for speaking French, Latin remains at the center of the curriculum. This privileged position of Latin is most often explained by the classicist roots of our culture. In fact, they go back to times even more distant than the era of the triumph of the cult of Roman antiquity, to that medieval period when Latin was the language of the clergy and their professional schools. For many centuries it was taught as a living language, and not only as the language of a certain culture, necessary for clergy, lawyers and statesmen. It was only at the beginning of the 18th century that Latin began to be taught for general education. We owe the long presence of Latin in school curricula mainly to the medieval roots of our school tradition.
The second difference is the lack of primary education. Primary education, as we understand it today, is neither specialized nor general education. In elementary school, they learn to write, read, speak correctly, that is, everything necessary so as not to get lost in life, regardless of profession and social status. However, in the Middle Ages and at the beginning of modern history, these initial knowledge and skills were not taught in schools, they were acquired at home and in the process of learning a craft. The school began with the study of Latin and ended at the level of knowledge that was necessary for a particular professional career. It was enough for the village priest to know the liturgical texts by heart, the future prosecutor needed more. Of course, the elementary knowledge of Latin was taught in the medieval school (the Psalter, for example; they learned to read from it), and, undoubtedly, elementary Latin stands at the origins (early 17th century) of the modern elementary school, as we will see later. But the Psalter is just a rudiment of the Latin school, its own system. With the transfer of the Psalter to the French system of “small schools”, the very spirit of this subject has changed - it has become something completely different.
The third difference is the lack of higher education in the humanities and natural sciences. Of course, there were faculties of theology, law and medicine, which still exist today. However, in medieval France there was nothing similar either to the higher educational institutions of Ancient Greece with natural science, rhetoric and philosophy classes, or to the humanitarian and natural science faculties that appeared at the beginning of the 19th century, in the era of Napoleon. The presence of such a gap seems especially strange when one thinks about the great importance of philosophy in medieval life. The discovery of the unknown works of Aristotle, the great Thomistic synthesis, should have contributed to the separate teaching of liberal arts and theology. Indeed, morality and metaphysics occupied such a significant place in the programs that part of the liberal arts was simply absorbed by philosophy. Thus, the dialectic of the trivium that existed earlier disappeared, making room for the “logic” that replaced it in school terminology, while logic becomes synonymous with philosophy. The question arose whether philosophy would coexist with grammar, even elementary forms of grammar, or would it separate from them to become the basis of higher education? In France and in England it happened in different ways.
In England, the Latin schools that were part of the universities - that is, Oxford and Cambridge colleges - differed from other, non-university, Latin schools. There was a tradition to begin the study of arts in the nearest Latin school, like that which existed at the Cathedral of St. Paul in London - they studied there until the age of fourteen. Such schools, very similar to the French Latin schools, later became known as the grammar school. Only at the end of the grammar school by the age of fourteen was a young man sent to study at Oxford or Cambridge. The difference in ages corresponds to the difference in programs. Philosophy and sciences were studied only within the walls of universities - this was at least the principle, since no one insisted on a strict delineation of the functions of educational institutions until the 18th century. In reality, the boundaries were rather blurred. In university colleges, the subjects and authors studied in the grammar school were revisited, following the principle of repetition, which was so dear to the pedagogy of the Middle Ages, and in the grammar school in the 15th-16th centuries, it happened that they read logic. The place of many subjects, such as rhetoric, has long been debatable. Brinsley, despite the fact that she was a part of grammar school programs for a long time, believed that rhetoric was more appropriate in the university curriculum. At the beginning of the 17th century, discussions were still ongoing, however, the state of affairs was fixed in accordance with the established custom - the grammar school prepares for the university, and the university has a monopoly on philosophical education, which was considered a necessary addition to ordinary education, and only then does specialized education begin - legal, theological and medical. The Faculty of Philosophy becomes in fact the embryo of higher education in the humanities in the modern sense of the word. In addition to England, the educational system developed in Germany as well.
In France, on the other hand, art schools linked to universities did not differ in any way - either in program or in the composition of students - from art schools in other cities where a university was never formed. Of course, in the 13th century Paris of St. Thomas, everything could have gone the way of Oxford and Cambridge. Parisian schools gathered students from all over the country who had already received knowledge in other schools. Already in the XII century, it is noted that the best students, having reached adolescence, continue to study in Chartres, Tournai, Orleans or Bologna. However, even there, in the famous schools, beginners still continue to study - in contrast to what happens in Oxford and Cambridge. The tradition of accepting only schoolchildren who have already received some kind of education has not developed. Perhaps the reason in Paris is the large increase in the local population, more numerous than in small English towns. The difference is great, so that French schools had to accept everyone from other areas, like our universities today, and local ones, like our today's lyceums and colleges. In any case, in such schools, philosophy is not separated from grammar and its beginnings, as a result of which the school programs in university cities do not differ from the programs of cities without a university, unless, of course, the cities were large enough.
The consequences of this way of life are visible even today. Philosophy remains in the curriculum of grammar schools, and when, starting from the 14th century, the education system is divided into levels, when subjects are allowed to be divided depending on their complexity and on the age of the students, philosophy is attributed to the end of the Latin cycle. It is studied in the last two classes as logic and physics, which corresponds to the modern class of philosophy. The logic and physics of the sixteenth century correspond at the same time to the university colleges of England and to our modern faculties of the humanities and sciences. The persistence in today's France of the division into two parts of the bachelor's degree examination is due to the fact that philosophy never separated from the arts. In England, there is no second exam, since the grammar school did not teach philosophy, that is, logic and physics.
We have tried to somehow define the position of the medieval school, starting from both its beginnings and what it has become. Now that we have got to know it better, we will try to identify several main features that are interesting for our study of the relationship between ages: the lack of differentiation of programs, the simultaneous teaching of subjects at different levels, the mixing of ages and school freedoms.
Lack of differentiation
There was no concept of education divided into several levels, corresponding to the difficulty of the subjects, from simple to complex. The most surprising example of the complete absence of such differentiation is provided by grammar. Since the 15th century, grammar has been classified as an elementary subject, and the further it goes, the more elementary it becomes. In antiquity, on the contrary, grammar is a science, and a complex science, corresponding to today's philology. The Middle Ages inherited from antiquity this concept of grammar, one of the components of the trivium, and even older students took it quite seriously. Thus, John of Salisbury in the twelfth century attends grammar lessons between the ages of seventeen and twenty. They read and reread the Commentarium grarnmaticorum libri of the 17th century by Priscian, a Latin grammarian of the 5th century. In 1215, the charter of the University of Paris ordered the art schools to study the books of Priscian for at least two years. Later, Prisciana would replace Alexandre de Wildier's Doctrinale puerorum (13th century), consisting of 12 chapters: declensions, exceptions to rules, degrees of comparison, articles or gender determiners, preterites and supines, exception verbs, four verb forms, transitive, intransitive and reciprocal constructions , long and short vowels, stress, syntax. The Doctrinal would be a general grammar textbook until the end of the 15th century, when it was replaced in France by Despoter, no less complex, but demonstrating - for the first time - a pedagogical approach, and not just a sum of scientific knowledge.
This scientific grammar was studied immediately after the reading of the Psalter, or even simultaneously with it, by children of about ten years old. Naturally, the teaching did not begin with Priscianus or the Doctrinal. The first book was Donatus, i.e. De octo partibus orationis Donatus, a grammar of the 4th century. This book was also called Donatus minor, to distinguish it from other books of Donatus, or Ars minor, and this suggests that we are talking about elementary education, which, however, was part of the arts. Later, "Donat" will become synonymous with basic knowledge: if you have learned Donat, then you will not be lost. Some private teachers were given the right to teach Donat, but only him.
In many manuscripts, Donat is supplemented by quotations from Priscian, who can be considered an author for older students. At the beginning of the 11th century, the Anglo-Saxon author Ælfric writes a dialogue in Latin intended for beginning scholars at the level of Donatus; he supplements his Excerptiones de Prisciano minore vel majore, resulting in something like a digest or an anthology of Donatus and Priscianus. On the other hand, in 1393 the book of Donatus is found among the descriptions of the things of the robbed Bolognese student, it is adjacent to the Doctrinal and the treatises of Boethius on dialectics, music and the quadrivium - as if today we found in the bag of a student of a philosophical class, among others, a grammar book French. This means that grammar was both a science and elementary knowledge; it equally occupied both a fifteen-twenty-year-old cleric and a ten-year-old novice. It was the same grammar and the same authors of the late empire.
Another example of the lack of division into levels is the school cycle of John of Salisbury. He was born around 1137. Came to Paris at the age of fourteen. By this age, he receives his first education: the Psalter, Donatus, the beginnings of the liberal arts. He arrives in Paris to supplement his knowledge with famous teachers. They, as in the XIII century, could specialize in one or another component of the liberal arts: one teacher could teach grammar, another - rhetoric, a third - dialectics or logic, someone else quadrivium, but such a division was not the rule. More often one and the same person taught all the arts, dwelling in more detail on a favorite subject. So, in the 16th century, Odoy de Tournay, who had 200 students, taught all the arts, despite the fact that “praecipue tamen in diaSectica eminebat” (lat. Mostly, however, shone in dialectics). And in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Paris and the university towns, the specialization of teachers is still just as relative. So, upon arrival in Paris, our student does not first turn to a grammar teacher. He attends dialectic classes, that is, he studies Boethius and Porphyry and their commentaries on Aristotle's Organon. He spends two years there, and when, after a long absence, he returns to Paris, he finds with the same teacher his former comrades, who are engaged in the same dialectical exercises, useless in his eyes, but of sufficient interest to keep the attention of students for a long time. In the thirteenth century, people often linger in the study of one or another subject from the category of liberal arts. Meanwhile, dialectics does not in the least divert John's attention from grammar, he does not intend to miss it, although he began his studies in Paris with dialectics. Over the course of three years, he returns to grammar several more times - he is already almost twenty. What is not an example of the dual position of grammar - both science and elementary knowledge. At the age of twenty, John does not part with the life of a schoolboy. He signs up for classes with a teacher, where he again goes through the same cycle ob eo cuncta relegi (lat. From the same to study again), with the addition of a quadrivium, which he has not yet touched, that is, sciences (et inaudita quaedam ad quadrivium pertinentia) . Then he takes up rhetoric, which he has already studied (relegi quoque rhetoricam), and ends his studies in logic, where he again meets the Organon. After that, he himself begins to teach art, earning a living from this, and will return to school only at the highest faculty, studying theology. While John of Salisbury has been studying the arts for many years, he does not follow any curriculum and no sequence can be established in his studies: dialectic, grammar, repetition of the trivium, quadrivium, rhetoric, logic. The order could be different. Traditions - what should follow in what sequence - did not exist. Each teacher drew up the program as he saw fit, and taught at one time subjects that, by common opinion, were on the same level in terms of difficulty and importance.
However, the "Reform of 1366 of the University of Paris" by the cardinals of Saint-Marc and Saint-Martin outlines some ways of differentiation by levels - such a trend is alien to the reform of Robert de Courcon of 1215. This text gives the program of university examinations. First of all, in order to pass determinatio - in the future, an exam for a bachelor's degree - it is required: 1) grammar, sint in grammatica edocti, et Doctrinale et Graecismum audtverint (Latin. If they were taught grammar ... Doctrinal and Greek would know), 2) logic , veterem artem totam (lat. Old to all arts), or the Organon, as well as Aristotle's On the Soul. To further pass on licencia docendi - physics and scientific treatises of Aristotle, de generatione et corruptione, de caelo et mundo, parva naturalia (lat. About the emergence, about the sky and the world, small in nature). For the degree of Master of Arts - "Ethics" and "Meteorology" of the same Aristotle. In this scheme, elements of differentiation are guessed: grammar and logic, which together occupy the most space in the programs of art classes, quadrivium and moral philosophy. However, this division remains inaccurate, since it leaves grammar and logic on the same plane; rather, it is a question of a classification corresponding to a more orderly school process than before, a better organization of examinations, with the aim of establishing for licentiates and students of a master's degree, subjects that are not required to take in order to obtain a bachelor's degree. However, such a distribution of subjects between the three types of examinations is dictated not by the degree of difficulty - "Organon" and "On the Soul" are not at all easier than "Physics" or "Ethics" - and not by the sequence in which they are taught, since the time for obtaining a bachelor's degree, a licentiate or the master's degree converges, and all three examinations actually merge by the beginning of a new story, becoming formal stages of the same test.
To be continued)
