Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VI.djvu/420

 412 EDUCATION magister), and instruction was entirely inde- pendent of the state till near the time of the emperors. Under the empire the Greek lit- erature was taught to the sons of the wealthy as carefully as the Latin, and the education was completed by rhetoricians, who in the time of Quintilian often received a salary from the public treasury. Athens, where there was an academy with 10 professors, was much frequented by the young Komans, and a school of high repute was founded in Constantinople by Constantine and reorganized by Theodosius the Younger. Girls were often carefully edu- cated during the latter period of the empire; and from about the close of the republic there appear to have been schools designed for them exclusively, where they were rarely visited by their fathers. The early Christians, unable to found separate schools for the education of their children, either instructed them at home or sent them to pagan schools. The most flourishing of these schools in the 2d century was that of Alexandria, where a multitude of pagans, Jews, and Christians prosecuted their studies together. By the side of this ancient institu- tion soon arose the Christian school of the catechists, said to have been founded by Pan- tsenus in 181, in which Christian theology as- sumed a regular and scientific form. Similar schools were soon established at Ca3sarea, An- tioch, Edessa, &c. In the West there were till the 5th century pagan schools in the largest cities, as Carthage, Rome, Milan, Treves, Marseilles, and Lyons; and owing to the paucity of the Christian institutions, it was common for distinguished doctors of the church to assemble around them the young men who purposed entering the priesthood, and to instruct them by their conversation rather than by regular lessons. Early in the 5th century learning found a refuge in the monasteries, which had been introduced in the East for purposes of solitude and contempla- tion, but in the West for quiet and union amid the disorders of society. In the 6th and 7th centuries the schools were of three classes, the parochial, the cathedral or episcopal, and the cloistral or conventual. The Irish monas- teries at this time surpassed all others in main- taining the traditions of learning. The course of seven sciences or liberal arts, divided into the trivium (grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, as- tronomy, and music), was introduced in the 6th century, and defined in two jargon hex- ameters : Gramm. loquitur; Dia. rera docet ; Rhet. verla colorat ; JUU8. camt; Ar.numerat; Geo.ponderat; Ast.colitastra. The 7th century, says Hallam, was the nadir of the human mind in Europe, and its move- ment in advance began with Charlemagne be- fore the close of the next. This monarch in- vited to his court Alcuin from the cloisters of York, Clement from Ireland, and Theodulf from Germany, and reestablished the palatial school, in which the sons of some of the no- bility were educated with his own children, and which accompanied him wherever he went. In this school (called the palatine acad- emy), and afterward in those of Tours and Fulda, the course of instruction embraced all the learning of the age. He also founded schools in every bishopric and monastery, in which reading, singing, computation, grammar, and the learning of psalms by heart were the exercises. Less than a century after Charle- magne, King Alfred revived letters and schools in England, which had been almost extin- guished by the Danish invasion, rich libraries having disappeared in the pillage of churches and convents. At his accession Wessex could not boast a single person able to translate a Latin book. He invited to his court the most celebrated scholars, established schools in dif- ferent parts of his kingdom, and ordained that the children of every free man whose circum- stances would allow it should acquire the arts of reading and writing, and that those designed for civil or ecclesiastical offices should be in- structed in the Latin language. Yet his efforts in behalf of learning were as unfruitful after his death as those of Charlemagne had been in France, and were succeeded by the men- tal torpor of the 10th century, in which, it has been remarked, no heresies appeared. As learning in that age was chiefly contained in a dead language in all the countries of Europe, it did not reach the mass of the people ; the art of writing was so rare among laymen even of the higher ranks, that it was called the clerical art. In the 10th century, the darkest period of Christian literature, the Arabs had flourish- ing schools of learning from Bagdad to Cor- dova. Of their 17 universities, that of Cordova enjoyed the highest reputation, and is said to have possessed a library of 600,000 volumes. Grammar, the art of versifying, history, geog- raphy, astronomy and astrology, chemistry and alchemy, mathematics, and medicine were all studied ; and in the last two departments the Arabians made important improvements on their Greek masters. An elementary school was attached to every mosque, in which read- ing and writing were taught, the pupils at the same time learning many poems by heart. The universities were chiefly occupied with theology, jurisprudence, and speculative phi- losophy ; and for the natural sciences there were special schools, while medicine was taught in hospitals. The rise of the scholastic philosophy and of the troubadour poetry, the institution of universities, and the return to a profound study of the Greek and Latin classics, were the literary steps during and after the llth century which preceded the revival of learning in the 14th and 15th centuries. From the 12th and 13th centuries, the era of the schoolmen, date 20 universities, including those of Paris, Montpellier, Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna, Pa- dua, Rome, Salamanca, and Lisbon. That of Bologna was especially famous for its revival