3d

Priscian to be finished

Just after the lectures of the Masters certain Bachelors, appointed for the purpose, reviewed the work given by the Masters in the morning. Two groups of Bachelors Period were appointed to do the work, one from the beginning of the Winter Term to Easter, and the other from Easter to the end of the Summer Term.

4th

No scheduled work. Possibly extraordinary lectures by Bachelors were given on Period Priscian and the "Old Logic" at this time.

MID-DAY MEAL

5th

Time set apart for conferences of the Bachelors, or for doing other things which Period the Masters might designate.

124. Value and Influence of the Medieval University (Rashdall, H., The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, vol. I, part п, pp. 703-12. Oxford 1895)

The standard history of the origin, development, customs, practices, work, and influence of the medieval universities is the three-volume one by Rashdall. It has been rated as "the best history of the subject in any language." From the concluding chapter of this work the following extracts are taken.

What was the real value of the education which the medieval university imparted? . . .

To the modern student, no doubt, the defects of a mediæval education lie upon the surface. The external defects of the University organization have already been incidentally noticed. In the older Uni

FIG. 21. A LECTURE AT A MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY

(After an illustration printed at Paris, in 1487)

The students are seated in rows, while beneath the pro-
fessor is seated the mace bearer of the institution, holding
upright his symbol of authority and prepared if necessary
to preserve order

versity system of northern Europe there is the want of selection and consequent incompetency of the teachers, and the excessive youth of the students in Arts. In the higher Faculties too we have encountered the constant effort on the part of the Doctors to evade the obligation of teaching without surrendering its emoluments, while the real teaching devolved upon half-trained Bachelors. It is, indeed, in the Student-Universities that the chairs would appear to have been most competently filled and their duties most efficiently discharged; in mediaval times students were more anxious to learn than teachers were to teach. In the earlier period again there was an utter want of discipline among students who ought to have been treated as mere schoolboys. The want was partially corrected (in England) by the growth of the College system, but the improvement in this respect was balanced by the decay and degradation in the higher intellectual life of the Universities. There is considerable reason to believe that in the Middle Ages a larger proportion than at the present day of the nominal students derived exceedingly little benefit from their University education. . . . In the earlier part of our period this must have been peculiarly the case, when so little exertion on the part of the student himself was required. A man was allowed year after year to sit through lectures of which he might not understand one word; later on this defect was partly remedied by the multiplication of "exercises" in College and Hall.

For the fairly competent student the main defects of a mediæval education may be summed up by saying that it was at once too dogmatic and too disputatious. Of

a

the superstitious adherence to
Aristotle or other prescribed au-
thority sufficient illustrations
have already been given. It is, of
course, a direct outcome of the
intellectual vice of the age
Ivice of which the human mind
was by no means cured by the
Renaissance or the Reformation.
It lasted longest where it was
most out of place. In the middle
of the seventeenth century a Doc-
tor of Medicine was compelled by
the English College of Physicians
to retract a proposition which he
had advanced in opposition to
the authority of Aristotle, under
threat of imprisonment. It may
seem a contradiction to allege

was at the same time too controversial. Yet the readiness with which the student was encouraged to dispute the thesis of a prescribed opponent, and the readiness with which he would swear to teach only the system of a prescribed authority, were but opposite sides of the same fundamental defect—the same fatal indifference to facts, the facts of external nature, the facts of history, and the facts of life. Books were put in the place of things. This is a defect which was certainly not removed by the mere substitution of Classics for Philosophy....

But, because it is easy enough to pick holes in the education of the past, it must not for one moment be supposed that the education either of the scholastic or of the ultra-classical period was of little value. Up to a certain point and this is the one consolation to the educational historian- the value of education is independent either of the intrinsic value or of the practical usefulness of what is taught. . . . It was emphatically so in the Middle Ages. Kings and princes found their statesmen and men of business in the Universities — most often, no doubt, among those trained in the practical science of Law, but not invariably so. Talleyrand is said to have asserted that Theologians made the best diplomatists. It was not the wont of the practical men of the Middle Ages to disparage academic training. The rapid multiplication of Universities during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was largely due to a direct demand for highly educated lawyers and administrators. In a sense the academic discipline of the Middle Ages was too practical. It trained pure intellect, encouraged habits of laborious subtlety, heroic industry, and intense application, while it left uncultivated the imagination, the taste, the sense of beauty, in a word, all the amenities and refinements of the civilized intellect. It taught men to think and to work rather than to enjoy. Most of what we understand by "culture," much of what Aristotle understood by the "noble use of leisure," was unappreciated by the medieval intellect. On the speculative side the Universities were (as has been said) "the school of the modern spirit": they taught men to reason and to speculate, to doubt and to inquire, to find a pleasure in the things of the intellect both for their own sake and for the sake of their applications to life. They dispelled forever the obscurantism of the Dark Ages. From a more practical point of view their greatest service to mankind was simply this, that they placed the administration of human affairs in short the government of the world - in the hands of educated men. The actual rulers the Kings or the aristocrats might often be as uneducated or more uneducated than modern democracies, but they had to rule through the instrumentality of a highly educated class.

In criticizing mediaval culture and education, attention is sometimes too much confined to the Scholastic Philosophy and Theology.