Page:Jesuit Education.djvu/45

Rh fifteenth century good and respectable parents, at least in Germany, began to consider it their duty to let their children acquire an education. This interest in education naturally led to the establishment of many new schools. Complaints are even made in some cities that too many schools are opened. The facts given so far prove also that it is not correct to say that the German "people's school" did not assume the shape of a school for the masses until the Reformation, or that medieval culture was but for the few, and that it was Luther who brought the schoolmaster into the cottage. Otherwise who frequented the numerous schools in towns and villages, where "everybody wanted to read and to write"?

What is now called "secondary education" was not as strictly distinguished from elementary and university training as it is now-a-days. From very early times higher education was cared for in numerous schools connected with monasteries and cathedrals. The merits of the Order of St. Benedict in preserving the treasures of classical literature are universally acknowledged. Its monks were not only the great clearers of land in Europe, at once missionaries and laborers, but also the teachers of the nations rising from barbarism to civilization.

Benedictine monasticism gave the world almost its only houses of learning and education, and constituted by far the most powerful civilizing agency in Europe, until it was superseded as an educational instrument by the growth of the universities. The period that