Historical Contributions to the Field of Education

When the late medieval period of the thirteenth century began to merge with the revival of classical learning and opened into the Renaissance, a whole range of reforms and innovative thought began to emerge in the European culture. Hayes, et al., refer to "what modern historians often call the 'renaissance of the twelfth century'"(3:239). Because there has been no wholesale rejection of culture and learning since that time throughout the whole of Western Civilization, it is not too much to suggest that the changes that began with the early stages of the Renaissance and the Reformation have continued to the present day. In other words, despite rumors to the contrary and cries of incipient decline, the Renaissance is alive and well in presentday Western culture. The very debates that take place about the decline of education, in this sense, are an indicator of the resilience of the Renaissance.

During the period of the twelfthcentury renaissance, the educational environment was highly stratified as to what today is called socioeconomics, with students preparing for higher learning and accomplishment in churc

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tin and that Shakespeare used a more modern English vernacular suggest less that education was becoming a prerogative of the lower classes than that the better educated of the higher social classes sought to extend the influence of English as a distinctive language in the Renaissance. For throughout the Renaissance and well into the modern period, education was widely thought to be the proper province of the aristocracy. Accordingly, the theories of learning and types of schools that emerged in the Renaissance and even after the Reformation were in most cases directed toward the upper classes. Theories of democratic as opposed to aristocratic education, as Russell notes, were to appear only in the nineteenth century (5:15, et passim). Nevertheless, it was during the Renaissance, which gained its first great foothold at the end of the fourteenth century, that categories of schools that were to begin important and generalized educational traditions began to be identified with specific humanistic educators. Vittorino da Feltre was a Venetian who established, as Gutek notes, a school designed to teach "the New Learning." This included the concept of the wellrounded individual who had been schooled in the liberal arts, theology, and
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Approximate Word count = 3083
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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