Evolution of Education

 

·      2 paths to knowledge

o  Auctoritas (authority) – what you learn from books

o  Experience

o  Canterbury Tales, Chaucer – Wife of Bath’s Prologue

·      Liberal Arts: (educational standard from antiquity to present)

o  Trivium

§  Grammar

§  Logic

§  rhetoric

o  Quadrivium

§  Arithmetic

§  Astrology/astronomy

§  Geometry

§  Music

·      Scholasticism: (educational standard from late antiquity to high middle ages)

o  Professional training for doctors, lawyers, and theologians

o  Focus on logic and natural philosophy

o  Used dialectical reasoning

o  Attempt to reconcile Christian theology with classical philosophy, esp. Aristotle and Plato

o  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 13th c.

·      Renaissance Humanism: (beginning in 14th and 15th c. in Italy)

o  Gave birth to / characteristic of the Renaissance

o  Humanities: focus on poetry, history, and moral philosophy (ethics)

o  Some famous Italian humanists: Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli.

o  Shakespeare’s Henry V (watched in class)