The History Of Education | Page 9

learning, and finally, first in Italy, and later in
the nations evolved from the tribes that had raided the Empire, there
came a period of awakening and rediscovery which led to the
development of the early university foundations, a wonderful revival of
ancient learning, a great expansion of men's thoughts, a great religious
awakening, a wonderful period of world exploration and discovery, the
founding of new nations in new lands, the reawakening of the spirit of
scientific inquiry, the rise of the democratic spirit, and the evolution of
our modern civilization.
By the end of the eleventh century it was clear that the long battle for
the preservation of civilization had been won, but it was not until the

fourteenth century that the Revival of Learning in Italy gave clear
evidence of the rise of the modern spirit. By the year 1500 much had
been accomplished, and the new modern questioning spirit of the
Italian Revival was making progress in many directions. Most of the
old learning had been recovered; the printing-press had been invented,
and was at work multiplying books; the study of Greek and Hebrew
had been revived in the western world; trade and commerce had begun;
the cities and the universities which had arisen had become centers of a
new life; a new sea route to India had been found and was in use;
Columbus had discovered a new world; the Church was more tolerant
of new ideas than it had been for centuries; and thought was being
awakened in the western world to a degree that had not taken place
since the days of ancient Rome. The world seemed about ready for
rapid advances in many directions, and great progress in learning,
education, government, art, commerce, and invention seemed almost
within its grasp. Instead, there soon opened the most bitter and
vindictive religious conflict the world has ever known; western
Christian civilization was torn asunder; a century of religious warfare
ensued; and this was followed by other centuries of hatred and
intolerance and suspicion awakened by the great conflict.
Still, out of this conflict, though it for a time checked the orderly
development of civilization, much important educational progress was
ultimately to come. In promulgating the doctrine that the authority of
the Bible in religious matters is superior to the authority of the Church,
the basis for the elementary school for the masses of the people, and in
consequence the education of all, was laid. This meant the creation of
an entirely new type of school--the elementary, for the masses, and
taught in the native tongue--to supplement the Latin secondary schools
which had been an outgrowth of the revival of ancient learning, and the
still earlier cathedral and monastery schools of the Church.
The modern elementary vernacular school may then be said to be
essentially a product of the Protestant Reformation. This is true in a
special sense among those peoples which embraced some form of the
Lutheran or Calvinistic faiths. These were the Germans, Moravians,
Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Dutch, Walloons, Swiss, Scotch,
Scotch-Irish, French Huguenots, and the English Puritans. As the
Renaissance gave a new emphasis to the development of secondary

schools by supplying them with a large amount of new subject-matter
and a new motive, so the Reformation movement gave a new motive
for the education of children not intended for the service of the State or
the Church, and the development of elementary vernacular schools was
the result. Only in England, of all the revolting countries, did this
Protestant conception as to the necessity of education for salvation fail
to take deep root, with the result that elementary education in England
awaited the new political and social and industrial impulses of the latter
half of the nineteenth century for its real development.
The rise of the questioning and inferring spirit in the Italian
Renaissance marked the beginnings of the transition from mediaeval to
modern attitudes, and one of the most important outgrowths of this was
the rise of scientific inquiry which in time followed. This meant the
application of human reason to the investigation of the phenomena of
nature, with all that this eventually implied. This, slowly to be sure,
turned the energies of mankind in a new direction, led to the
substitution of inquiry and patient experimentation for assumption and
disputation, and in time produced a scientific and industrial revolution
which has changed the whole nature of the older problems. The
scientific spirit has to-day come to dominate all lines of human
thinking, and the applications of scientific principles have, in the past
century, completely changed almost all the conditions surrounding
human life. Applied to education, this new spirit has transformed the
instruction and the methods of the schools, led to the creation of
entirely new types of educational institutions, and introduced entirely