The History Of Education by Ellwood P. Cubberley (little red riding hood read aloud .txt) 📕

THE MONASTIC ORGANIZATION. In the early days of Christianity, it will be remembered (p. 87), the Christian convert held himself apart from the wicked world all about him, and had little to do with the society or the government of his time. He regarded the Church as having no relationship to the State. As the Church grew stronger, however, and became a State within a State, the Christian took a larger and larger part in the world around him, and in time came to be distinguished from other men by his profession of the Christian religion rather than by any other mark. Many of the early bishops were men of great political sagacity, fully capable of realizing to the full the political opportunities, afforded by their position, to strengthen the power of the Church. It was the work of men of this type that created the temporal power of the Church, and made of it an institution capable of commanding respect and enforcing its decisions.

To some of the early Christians this life did not appeal. To them holiness was associated with a complete withdrawal from contact with this sinful world and all its activities. Some betook themselves to the desert, others to the forests or mountains, and others shut themselves up alone that they might be undisturbed in their religious meditations. To such devoted souls monasticism, a scheme of living brought into the Christian world from the East, made a strong appeal. It provided that such men should live together in brotherhoods, renouncing the world, taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and devoting their lives to hard labor and the mortification of the flesh that the soul might be exalted and made beautiful. The members lived alone in individual cells, but came together for meals, prayer, and religious service.

As early as 330 a monastery had been organized on the island of Tebernae, in the Nile. About 350 Saint Basil introduced monasticism into Asia Minor, where it flourished greatly. In 370 the Basilian order was founded. The monastic idea was soon transferred to the West, a monastery being established at Rome probably as early as 340. The monastery of Saint Victor, at Marseilles, was founded by Cassian in 404, and this type of monastery and monastic rule was introduced into Gaul, about 415. The monastery of Lerins (off Cannes, in southern France) was established in 405. During the fifth century a rapid extension of monastic foundations took place in western Europe, particularly along the valleys of the Rhone and the Loire in Gaul.

[Illustration: FIG. 29. A BENEDICTINE MONK, ABBOT, AND ABBESS

(From a thirteenth-century manuscript)]

In 529 Saint Benedict, a Roman of wealth who fled from the corruption of his city, founded the monastery of Monte Cassino, south of Rome, and established a form of government, or rule of daily life, which was gradually adopted by nearly all the monasteries of the West. In time Europe came to be dotted with thousands of these establishments, many of which were large and expensive institutions both to found and to maintain.

[24] By the time the barbarian invasions were in full swing monasticism had become an established institution of the Christian Church. Nunneries for women also were established early. A letter from Saint Jerome to Marcella, a Roman matron, in 382, in which he says that “no high-born lady at Rome had made profession of the monastic life … or had ventured …

publicly to call herself a nun,” would seem to imply that such institutions had already been established in Rome.

MONASTIC SCHOOLS. Poverty, chastity, obedience, labor, and religious devotion were the essential features of a monastic life. The Rule of Saint Benedict (R. 43) organized in a practical way the efforts of those who took the vows. In a series of seventy-three rules which he laid down, covering all phases of monastic life, the most important from the standpoint of posterity was the forty-eighth, prescribing at least seven hours of daily labor and two hours of reading “for all able to bear the load.” From that part of the rule requiring regular manual labor the monks became the most expert farmers and craftsmen of the early Middle Ages, while to the requirement of daily reading we owe in large part the development of the school and the preservation of learning in the West during the long intellectual night of the mediaeval period (R. 44).

Into these monastic institutions the oblati, that is, those who wished to become monks, were received as early as the age of twelve, and occasionally earlier (R. 53 a). The final vows (R. 53 b) could not be taken until eighteen, so during this period the novice was taught to work and to read and write, given instruction in church music, and taught to calculate the church festivals and to do simple reckoning. In time some condensed and carefully edited compendium of the elements of classical learning was also studied, and still later a more elaborate type of instruction was developed in some of the monasteries. This, however, belongs to a later division of this history, and further description of church and monastic education will be deferred until we study the intellectual life of the Middle Ages.

THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS. Aside from the general instruction in the practices of the church and home instruction in the work of a woman, there was but little provision made for the education of girls not desiring to join a convent or nunnery. A few, however, obtained a limited amount of intellectual training. The letter of Saint Jerome to the Roman lady Paula (R. 45), regarding the education of her daughter, is a very important document in the history of early Christian education for girls. Dating from 403, it outlines the type of training a young girl should be given who was to be properly educated in Christian faith and properly consecrated to God. What he outlined was education for nunneries, a number of which had been founded in the East and a few in the West. In the West these institutions later experienced an extensive development, and offered the chief opportunity for any intellectual education for women during the whole of the Middle Ages.

III. WHAT THE MIDDLE AGES STARTED WITH

WHAT THE CHURCH BROUGHT TO THE MIDDLE AGES. From a small and purely spiritual organization, devoting its energies to exhortation and to the moral regeneration of mankind, and without creed or form of government, as the Christian Church was in the first two centuries of its development, we have traced the organization of a body of doctrine, the perfection of a strong system of church government, and the development of a very limited educational system designed merely to train leaders for its service. We have also shown how it added to its early ecclesiastical organization a strong governmental organization, became a State within a State, and gradually came to direct the State itself. It was thus ready, when the virtual separation of the Roman Empire into an eastern and western division took place, in 395, and when the western division finally fell before the barbarian onslaughts, to take up in a way the work of the State, force the barbarian hordes to acknowledge its power, and begin the process of civilizing these new tribes and building up once more a civilization in the western world. In addition to its spiritual and political power, the Church also had developed, in its catechumenal instruction and in the cathedral and monastic schools, a very meager form of an educational system for the training of its future leaders and servants. A great change had now taken place in the nature of education as a preparation for life, and intellectual education, in the sense that it was known and understood in Greece and Rome, was not to be known again in the western world for almost a thousand years. The distinguishing characteristic of the centuries which follow, up to the Revival of Learning, are, first, a struggle against very adverse odds to prevent civilization from disappearing entirely, and later a struggle to build up new foundations upon which world civilization might begin once more where it had left off in Greece and Rome.

THE THREE GREAT CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD. Thus, before the Middle Ages began, the three great contributions of the ancient world which were to form the foundations of our future western civilization had been made. Greece gave the world an art and a philosophy and a literature of great charm and beauty, the most advanced intellectual and aesthetic ideas that civilization has inherited, and developed an educational system of wonderful effectiveness—one that in its higher development in time took captive the entire Mediterranean world and profoundly modified all later thinking. Rome was the organizing and legal genius of the ancient world, as Greece was the literary and philosophical. To Rome we are especially indebted for out conceptions of law, order, and government, and for the ability to make practical and carry into effect the ideals of other peoples. To the Hebrews we are indebted for the world’s loftiest conceptions of God, religious faith, and moral responsibility, and to Christianity and the Church we are indebted for making these ideas universal in the Roman Empire and forcing them on a barbaric world.

All these great foundations of our western civilization have not come down to us directly. The hostility to pagan learning that developed on the part of the Latin Fathers; the establishment of an eastern capital for the Empire at Constantinople, in 328; the virtual division of the Empire into an East and West, in 395; and the final division of the Christian Church into a Western Latin and an Eastern Greek Church, which was gradually effected, finally drove Greek philosophy and learning and the Greek language from the western world. Greek was not to be known again in the West for hundreds of years. Fortunately the Eastern Church was more tolerant of pagan learning than was the Western, and was better able to withstand conquest by barbarian tribes. In consequence what the Greeks had done was preserved at Constantinople until Europe had once more become sufficiently civilized and tolerant to understand and appreciate it.

Hellenic learning was then handed back to western Europe, first through the medium of the Saracens, and then in that great Revival of Learning which we know as the Renaissance. Of the Latin literature and learning much was lost, and much was preserved almost by accident in the monasteries of mediaeval Europe. Even the Church itself was seriously deflected from its earlier purpose and teachings during the long period of barbarism and general ignorance through which it passed, and only in modern times has it tried to come back to the spirit of