Melanchthon, Teacher of Germany
Melanchthon made the revival of education the main aim of his life, and thanks to his guidance and activity many schools were founded, so that by the end of the sixteenth century Germany had some 300. He drew up a plan for the organization of schools and universities (1527); wrote textbooks for Latin and Greek grammar, rhetoric, logic, psychology, ethics and theology; and trained thousands of teachers for the new schools and universities. In gratitude his country gave him the title "Teacher of Germany."
The universities of northern Germany came one after another under Protestant supervision: Wittenberg (1522), Marburg (1527), Tubingen (1535), Leipzig (1539), Konigsberg (1544), Jena (1558); and professors and students who (in the words of Ulrich, Duke of Wurttemberg) opposed "the right and true evangelical belief" were driven out of these centers of learning. Followers of Calvin were expelled from Lutheran schools, and Protestants were not admitted to the universities still in Catholic hands. After the Peace of Augsburg (1555) the students of each German state were in general forbidden to study at schools of a faith other than the official one of their ruler.
Johannes Sturm and the Gymnasium
Johannes Sturm made a great contribution to the new education by founding a "gymnasium" (secondary school) at Strasbourg (1538), and in the same year he published an influential treatise, That Schools of Letters Ought to Be Opened. Like many intellectual leaders of central Europe, Sturm had gained learning among the "Brethren of the Common Life." He traveled to Louvain and Paris, where he met Rabelais; the famous letter in Gargantua on education may reflect a meeting of the minds of the two men.
While Sturm held that the chief aim of education was "the creation of a rational sense of religion," he gave growing importance to the study of Latin and Greek language and literature, and this attention to teaching and spreading the Greek and Roman classics passed later to the German gymnasia, producing an army of scholars who in the nineteenth century made the ancient world the field of their research and carried off rich spoils from it.
England, France, Spain and Elsewhere
English schools were damaged by the religious change more than German ones. In the heat of the attack on the church's excesses and profiteering, the schools attached to cathedrals, monasteries and guilds, and those maintained by church endowments, all melted away. Since most university students came from these schools, when that source dried up, Oxford produced only 173 bachelors of arts and Cambridge only 191 in 1548. In 1547 and 1550 Oxford had no arts graduates at all. Henry VIII saw the problem, but his need for money to satisfy his wars and pleasures kept his hands tied in founding Trinity College at Cambridge and paying stipends to professors appointed by royal command to teach theology, Hebrew and Greek, medicine and law. In this period, however, private benefactors founded colleges: Corpus Christi, Christ Church, Trinity and St. John's at Oxford and Magdalene at Cambridge. The royal commission sent by Cromwell to Oxford and Cambridge to take charge of the universities' privileges and endowments (1535) placed the curriculum and its supervision in the hands of the state. As a result, the age of scholastic philosophy in England came to an end, Duns Scotus was left to the ravages of time, canon law was thrown aside, the study of Latin and Greek flourished and the curriculum of the two universities in general came out from under religious influence, though intolerance in religious opinion remained. In 1553 every candidate for the bachelor's degree was required by law to subscribe to the religious Articles of the Anglican Church.
In France and Catholic Flanders, universities kept their endowments and students but lost the power and freedom of intellectual life. New universities opened at Reims, Douai, Lille and Besancon. Louvain rivaled Paris in number of students (5,000) and in a defense of orthodoxy that seemed extreme even to the popes. Paris enrolled up to 6,000, but no longer drew many foreign students and, unlike in its glory in the thirteenth century, no longer welcomed the promoters of new and ardent ideas. Its faculties were so dominated by the theology faculty of the Sorbonne that the name Sorbonne nearly replaced the name of the University of Paris itself. Montaigne found the teaching of theology and selected classics at the Sorbonne shallow, monotonous and parrot-like. Rabelais never tired of satirizing the dry scholastic rules and logic-chopping of the Sorbonne and the waste of his pupils' lives on disputes carefully chosen far from the needs of real life. Clement Marot cried: "I would have been ready to forgo my eternal share if only those noble gentlemen," his teachers, "had not wasted my youth."
The whole force and authority of the university was used not only against French Protestants but against the humanist scholars of the country. Francis I, who had tasted Italian wine and seen priests steeped in Greek and Roman letters, did all he could to free French scholarship from the reactionary and disheartening rule of the Sorbonne. At the prompting of Guillaume Bude, Cardinal Jean du Bellay and the tireless Marguerite of Navarre, Francis provided funds and in 1529 founded a school independent of the university and devoted to the studies of humanism. At first four "royal lecturers," two for Greek and two for Hebrew, were appointed and began work; later chairs of Latin, mathematics, medicine and philosophy were added. Instruction there was free. This royal school, later called the "College de France," became the warm hearth of French humanism and nursed free thought with French discipline.
Spain, though fanatically attached to religious regulations, had distinguished universities, numbering fourteen by 1553, among them the newly founded Toledo, Santiago and Granada. Salamanca, which in 1574 had seventy professors and 6,778 students, equaled any university of repute. Italian universities too continued to grow; Bologna in 1543 had fifty-seven professors in arts, thirty-seven in law and fifteen in medicine, and Padua was a place of pilgrimage for bold students from beyond the Alps. Poland recorded its golden age with an enrollment of 15,338 students at the University of Krakow; at Poznan the Lubranski Academy, founded in 1519 by Bishop Jan Lubranski, devoted itself to humanist studies. On the whole, in this revolutionary century the universities of Catholic countries suffered less than those of Protestant ones.
Teachers, Students and Women's Learning
The teacher's importance was not properly recognized and his pay was pitifully low. Lecturers at the "Royal College" received two hundred crowns a year, and even that salary was quite exceptional. At Salamanca, candidates for professorships, after giving a trial course, were chosen by their own students; teaching was mostly by lecture and was sometimes relieved by debates among students. Note-taking often took the place of the textbook; dictionaries were rare and laboratories did not exist at all, except for the alchemists. Students lived in cold, poor rooms and often fell ill from unsuitable or tainted food. Many poor students worked their way through college.
Classes began at six in the morning and ended at five in the afternoon. Discipline was very strict, and even senior students were not exempt from the whip. To warm themselves, students brawled in the streets or took refuge in whatever wine and sweetheart they could find, and finally, in one condition or another, completed their studies to the point of a degree.
Girls of the lower classes remained wholly illiterate; many middle-class girls received their elementary instruction in convents; and young women of noble families had private tutors. Holland boasted women who could understand love talk in Latin. In Germany Peutinger's wife and the sisters and daughters of Pirckheimer were known for learning. In France the women of Francis I's court adorned their flirtations and love affairs with quotations from the classics. In England cultured ladies such as More's daughters, Lady Jane Grey, "Bloody Mary" and Queen Elizabeth were outstanding examples of learned women.
Sir Thomas Elyot
Two famous teachers belong to this period. The lesser of the two was Sir Thomas Elyot, who in 1531 wrote The Boke Named the Governour on how to train the sons of nobles to prepare them to govern the country. Elyot first condemned severely the ignorance and emptiness of the English nobility, contrasting it with the learning and worth of the statesmen of ancient Greece and Rome, and quoted the Greek Cynic Diogenes, who saw an ignorant man sitting on a stone and said, "Behold how one stone sits upon another." In his view a boy at seven should be placed under a carefully chosen private tutor and learn the elements of music, painting and sculpture. At fourteen he should learn astronomy, logic, history and the skills of wrestling, hunting, archery with the longbow, swimming and tennis, but not football, which belonged to the common people and "contained nothing but beastly fury and bodily harm." At every stage of his training a boy should read the great classics: first the poets, then the orators, then the historians, then the generals, then the philosophers and, at the very end, as if it had suddenly come to mind, the Bible.
Thus Elyot almost reversed Luther's plan of education by putting the study of the Bible at the end of his curriculum. In fact, in spite of his protests, Elyot preferred the classics far above the Bible: "O great God, what incomparable sweetness is contained in the thoughts and words of Plato and Cicero, and how dignity, spiritual delight, lofty thought, divine eloquence, perfect virtue and incredible pleasure are blended in their works," so much so that "those works alone are almost enough" to produce a capable and perfect ruler.
Juan Luis Vives
The more important teacher, Juan Luis Vives, the most humanist of all humanists, had a higher aim and traveled a broader path. Born in Valencia in 1492, he left Spain at seventeen and never saw it again. In Paris he studied long enough to conceive a passion for philosophy and to cast off the collar of scholastic philosophy. At twenty-six he wrote the first history of philosophy in the modern style, On the Origin, Schools and Place of Philosophy. In the same year, by his sharp protest against teaching philosophy by the scholastic method, he roused the universities against himself. In his view holding debates to strengthen students' mental powers produced nothing but futile quarrels over fruitless topics. Erasmus praised Vives's book, recommended it to Thomas More, and politely expressed fear that Vives would "eclipse Erasmus in his shadow." Perhaps through Erasmus's influence Vives was appointed professor of humanities at the University of Louvain (1519). At Erasmus's urging he published a new edition of St. Augustine's City of God with detailed notes and dedicated it to Henry VIII; he received so friendly an answer that he set out for England (1523). Thomas More and Queen Catherine, his compatriot, welcomed him warmly, and Henry VIII made him one of the private tutors of the princess Mary. Apparently as a guide for that princess he wrote his book on the education of girls (1523, as the book gives it). All went well until he protested against Henry VIII's demand to annul his marriage to Queen Catherine. Henry cut off his pension and kept him under watch in his house for six weeks. After his release Vives returned to Bruges (1528) and spent the rest of his life there.
At thirty-seven Vives was still an idealist thinker; in the manner of Erasmus he wrote a treatise on the need for an international court of arbitration to prevent war, Concord and Discord in Mankind, and dedicated it to Charles V. Two years later he published his major work, On Transmitting the Disciplines, which is regarded as the most advanced treatise on education of the Renaissance. His aim in it was a method of education that would "prepare persons for the needs of life, develop their mind and body as far as possible, and cultivate and increase in them a sense of reverence."
Vives believed that the student should enter school "as if setting foot in a sacred shrine," but that his education there should make him a courteous and useful citizen. This education should continue throughout life and be learned so that its relation to daily life remains lasting. Nature too, like books, should be examined scientifically, because things teach more than opinions. Let the student see with his own eyes veins, nerves, bones and other parts of the body in dissection; let him converse with farmers, hunters, shepherds and gardeners ... and learn their knowledge; for these gleaners will be more useful than "the babbling that, under the name of scholastic logic, has corrupted all branches of human learning." The classics, in purified form, should always form a major part of young people's curriculum, but contemporary history and geography must be studied too. The vernacular languages should be learned side by side with Latin, and Latin only by the direct method of everyday conversation. Vives was so far ahead in his thinking that his age soon lost sight of him and left him to die in hardship. He remained a Catholic to the end of his life.