The purpose of this research is to examine major contributions to the field of education that have derived from the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which the contributions of the Renaissance and the Reformation emerged, and to identify three types of schools that came from these two phenomena.
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 present day 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 twelfth century renaissance, the educational environment was highly stratified as to what today is called socioeconomics, with students preparing for higher learning and accomplishment in church, politics, or commerce. Hayes, et al., cite the medieval schooling in the seven liberal arts, divided into the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and the quadrivum (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music), which had been inherited from the classical tradition laid down by Martinus Capella in the fourth century A.D. (3:59; 239). In the thirteenth century, this was overlaid with a belief that the highest endeavor of learning was to grapple with theology. Out of...