Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/283

Rh

direct interest in promoting education. They eked out their scanty stipends as tutors and schoolmasters."

"One of the first fruits of the revival of literature in England, was the universal establishment of schools. To every cathedral, and almost to every monastery, a school was appended. . . . Few persons of any note appear to us among the clergy, during the century after the conquest, who did not during some part of their lives occupy themselves in instructing others."

In exemplification may be named, as distinguished teachers belonging to the priesthood during the Anglo-Saxon period, Bede, Alcuin, Scotus Erigena, and Dunstan. And after the Conquest, as teachers sufficiently conspicuous to be specified, come Athelard of Bath, John of Salisbury, Alexander Neckam, Roger of Hoveden, Duns Scotus.

But here as elsewhere the secularization of teaching slowly went on in sundry ways. Early in the fifteenth century laymen here and there left money for the founding of schools. Warton, writing of the early part of the sixteenth century, says:—"The practice of educating our youth in the monasteries growing into disuse, near twenty new grammar schools were established within this period." At the same time there was initiated a slow change in the character of our universities. Beginning as clusters of theological students gathered round clerical teachers of wide reputation, they, while growing, long continued to be places for clerical education only, and afterward simulated it. Almost down to the present day acceptance of the legally-established creed has been in them a condition to the reception of students and the conferring of distinctions; and they have all along preserved a teaching and discipline conspicuously priestly. We have residence in colleges under a régime suggestive of the monastic; we have daily attendance at prayers, also monastic in its associations; and we have the wearing of a semi-priestly dress. But gradually the clerical character of the education has been modified by the introduction of more and more non-religious subjects of instruction, and by the relaxation of tests which a dominant ecclesiasticism once imposed. So that now the greater part of those who "go to college," do so without any intention of entering the Church: university teaching has been in a large measure secularized.

Meanwhile the multiplied minor teaching institutions of all grades, though they have in the majority of cases passed into the hands of laymen, still, in considerable measure, and especially throughout their higher grades, retain a clerical character. The public schools in general are governed by ecclesiastics; and most of the masters are, if not in orders, preparing to take orders. Moreover, a large proportion of the private schools throughout the kingdom to which the wealthier classes send their sons are