2 The Begining Of Schooling, Hamilton 2015.pdf

Journal of Curriculum Studies

ISSN: 0022-0272 (Print) 1366-5839 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tcus20

The beginning of schooling - as we know it? David Hamilton To cite this article: David Hamilton (2015) The beginning of schooling - as we know it?, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 47:5, 577-593, DOI: 10.1080/00220272.2015.1052851 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2015.1052851

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Date: 14 October 2015, At: 23:37

J. CURRICULUM STUDIES, 2015 Vol. 47, No. 5, 577–593, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2015.1052851

The beginning of schooling - as we know it?

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DAVID HAMILTON This essay offers an account of the beginnings of modern schooling. The Latin word schola began to mean ‘school’ in the nineth century. But early practices associated with this newly distinct social phenomenon took several centuries to become codified, institutionalized and recognized. Until that happened, school was a label or brand-image used by purveyors of learning. Ideas about unified activity, method, order, discipline and efficiency formed the foundation of institutional codification. Beginning in the Renaissance and strengthened in the Reformation, codification reached a highpoint in the preparation of Comenius’ Didactica Magna in the middle of the seventeenth century. And these assumptions about standardization and normalization have continued to nourish the appeal of modern schooling for at least another 300 years.

Keywords: schooling; history; standardization; normalization

In 2013, the Journal of Curriculum Studies produced a special issue arising, from a submission by Daniel Tanner, emeritus professor in the Graduate School of Education, Rutgers University, USA. Tanner’s manuscript lamented the fact that, in the USA, ‘teaching-to-the-test’ had risen to become an ‘approved or “best” pedagogical practice’, something which had ‘deleterious consequences for the school curriculum’ (2013, pp. 5, 4). The JCS editor, recognizing that these ‘angry’ judgements (Hopmann, 2013, p. 1), had wider implications, published them with invited contributions from international members of the curriculum community, and launched the collected contributions using the editorial provocation: ‘the end of schooling as we know it?’ Tanner’s comments, like Hopmann’s editorial observations, struggled with the thesis that, by the twenty-first century, schooling had become the subject of reorientation and re-evaluation. Yet, none of the contributors responded directly to Hopmann’s question about the future of schooling. If schooling has had a beginning and a middle, might it also have an end? Such speculation on the historical status of schooling is welcome. I accept, with Tanner, that recent US policies overshadow the enduring status of comprehensive secondary schooling; I am sympathetic with the other contributors’ efforts at charting the global impact of neoliberal ideas; and I share Hopmann’s worries about the future of schooling (see for instance, Hamilton, 1988). David Hamilton retired as a professor of Pedagogik, Umea˜ University in 2005; email: [email protected]. Previously, he held positions at Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool Universities. His research interests have included classroom life, curriculum evaluation and the history of schooling. His most recent book, co-authored with Benjamin Zufiaurre, is Blackboards and Bootstraps: The revisioning of education and Schooling b (Rotterdam: Sense, 2013). © 2015 Taylor & Francis

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Fortunately, Hopmann’s editorial was neither didactic nor authoritarian. He used a rhetorical question about ‘the end of schooling as we know it?’ to stimulate debate among ‘readers and colleagues’ (Hopmann, 2013, p. 3). Lamentation about deficiencies in popular schooling have, of course, been composed and broadcast for centuries. But on this occasion, the Journal of Curriculum Studies chose an alternative strategy. It did not embark on the advancement of new policies and practices. Instead, it considered the historicity of schooling. On this occasion, I want to adopt a similar stance and, like Hopmann, Tanner and their co-authors, revisit the changing state of schooling. To achieve my aim, however, I turn Hopmann’s question upside down and relate it to the empirical past rather than the speculative future. What, then, might be construed as the beginning of schooling as we know it? Beginnings and precursors Questions about the beginnings of schooling are conceptual and cultural as well as chronological and historical. It is always possible to reach further back and across the historical record, if only because all human practices have an economic and cultural setting. Equally, schooling and education are also motivated by intergenerational intentions that are transient and, thus, liable to fade away. This evanescence also makes it difficult to distinguish education from schooling. The Latin etymology of the word education denotes a process of ‘leading out’; pedagogy is its classical Greek synonym; and ‘upbringing’ is its closest English translation. As a practice, therefore, the process of upbringing or education is as old as the human species. Schooling, on the other hand, is uniquely human. It arises from human activity and its institutional forms are easily discerned in the historical record—often by the time such educational practices have become institutionalized. Sadly, English-language sources focusing on this institutionalization process are sparse and ethnocentric. Surviving artefacts which might confirm the institutionalization of practices are missing. For instance, in Literate Education in Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (1998), Teresa Morgan claims, variously, that ‘it is impossible to identify any surviving philosophical text as a “school text” as distinct from a “professional” philosophical text’ (p. 17) and that ‘we have scarcely any archaeological sites even tentatively identifiable as “school rooms”’ (p. 28). Accordingly, she was led to conclude that: ‘in sum, we know almost nothing about the institution of education in the classical period’ (p. 19; see also Beard, 2013; Too, 2001). The problem of distinguishing beginnings from precursors, is also visited in Michel Rouche’s 700-page Histoire Ge´ne´rale de l’Enseignement et de l’E´ducation en France: Des origines a´ la Renaissance (1981/2003). As his title suggests, Rouche is careful to acknowledge that instructional practices— l’enseignement and l’education—should be seen merely as precursors of schooling. In a later work, translated into English, he uses an etymological argument to make a similar point:

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The term schola, which once referred to the imperial guard, came to be applied in turn to a train of warrior servants who waited on the king, to the group of clergymen who waited on the bishop, to the monks of a monastery and ultimately to a choral society; it did not mean ‘school’ before the ninth century. (Rouche, 1987, p. 429)

Rouche’s thesis about the advent of schooling is, however, undeveloped in both these cited texts. Fortunately, this tension between intentions and artefacts finds a sympathetic resolution in C. Stephen Jaeger’s The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (1994). Jaeger points to a French source, echoing Rouche, which suggests that in the eight and nineth centuries, ‘there were no monastic schools, properly speaking: nor are there schools in the monasteries … the school was the monastery in its entirety’ (p. 383, note 37). Jaeger’s explanation is based on the thesis that, previously, the ‘the most ancient form of pedagogy’ comprised ‘imitation of the teacher’ such that the ‘essence of instruction’ revolved around the ‘physical presence of the teacher’ whose way of life and ‘personal charisma’ provided ‘the curriculum’ (p. 76). The potency of such charismatic teaching had, it seems, begun to fade by the twelfth century. The old learning, ‘manners without letters’ (p. 228), was ‘moved out of real life’ (i.e. the immediate presence of teachers) and became ‘thoroughly textualised’ in the form of a ‘didactic and imaginative literature’ (p. 14). Charismatic teaching was repackaged or recycled with an explicitly instructional intention (e.g. texts designed for Latin instruction). And, in turn, this textualized repackaging favoured independent, free-moving teachers who, basing their teaching on such portable texts, operated outside the immediate jurisdiction and control of the church. Purveyors of learning Such institutionalization of education eventually went public—by gradually moving into the market place, a transition recorded in a fresco painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c1290–1348) that is still to be found in the town hall of Sienna, Italy. Lorenzetti’s representation in Allegory of Good Government: Effects of Good Government in the City (1330–1340, available online), includes a bustling market place where a teacher has set up shop in a covered arcade between a shoemaker and a butcher. The market-place setting is also suggestive in other ways. In what sense were these teachers also sponsored by local governments instead of the church—Grendler, for instance, claims that, in Italy, ‘most’ ecclesiastical schools had been replaced by communal or independent schools by 1300 (1989, p. 6). And in what sense, if any, did these ‘masters’ follow other traders by institutionalising their practices through the operation of self-regulating guilds? Positioned beyond the immediate institutional influence of church and university, these teachers took up the challenge and prospects of textualization. Two English-language sources offer illumination of this transition: Nicholas Orme’s Medieval Schools from Roman Britain to Renaissance England (2006); and Robert Black’s Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (2001).

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Both authors recognize that there were many ‘purveyors of learning’ (Orme, 2006, p. 165) in the Middle Ages and that it is difficult, if not ahistorical, to describe their work as centred on purpose-built schools where cohorts or classes of learners follow syllabuses and curricula. Instead, they build their accounts on the study of texts deemed to have been used for teaching young learners. ‘It is not easy’, Orme accepted, to ‘pass from the curriculum to the pupils and their surroundings’ (p. 31) since for a ‘long time’ after the twelfth century, it is rarely possible for historians to distinguish ‘professional teachers’ from ‘part-time, clerical or semi-clerical teachers’ (p. 165) who circulated between churches and wealthy families. Collectively, however, these purveyors of learning had begun to map out and colonize a ‘world of instruction’ (McClintock, 1971). Populated by texts designed to advance access to Latin, this world had a complex form. What were these texts? How were they to be used? Were they written for teachers or learners? Were they instructional texts? Or merely moral texts for self-improvement? Orme’s text repeatedly visits such questions. He includes an illustration is of a 10th-century psalter describing it as a religious text ‘for teaching reading until well after the Reformation’ (p. 34). Yet, no evidence is provided to indicate that it was, in fact, used for this purpose rather than, for instance, as a text for ‘devotional or liturgical use’—one of the definitions in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Orme also refers to the Doctrinale of Alexander of Ville-Dieu as a ‘teaching manual’ written ‘for the education of the … nephews [of the Bishop of Dol, Brittany] in about 1190’ (p. 90). Although it ‘became used almost universally’ its status as a school—i.e. pre-university—text is undermined by the fact that, in 1366, it was even prescribed as a set book by the University of Paris’ (p. 91). From Orme’s account—the fact that it was used by students ‘right through the curriculum’—allows that it may have been more of a reference source than a Latin primer. Other texts, however, can be more easily ascribed as serving instructional purposes. Orme indicates that between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries, instructional texts were sometimes preceded with an alphabet which, itself, had a cross before the A and ‘amen’ after the final character. The cross served as a visual prompt for learners who launched their reading with the invocation ‘Christ’s cross speed me’ and concluded their efforts with ‘amen’ (p. 56). Robert Black confronts the uncertainties raised by Orme. He studied 1305 manuscript texts initially ascribed to ‘school authors’ and produced around the Northern Italian city of Florence. Adopting a cautious stance, however, Black judges that only 324 (25%) show evidence of having been ‘used in grammar (i.e. Latin) schools in the period up to the end of the 15th century’ (Appendix IV). What evidence did he use? Some texts were explicitly prepared for doctores puerum (teachers of children, p. 55); while other texts incorporated literary devices to support children’s learning. These devices included distinct introductory material (accessus, p. 314), key phrases or maxims (sententia, p. 320), summaries (summa, p. 171), and using alphabets to fill the space at the end of texts (p. 262).

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Black’s most significant contribution to the understanding of medieval education was his forensic scrutiny of the texts themselves. By focusing on the glosses and marginalia added by later copyists and readers, he was able to gain a sense of the history of such texts. His analysis builds upon evidence of schoolboys’ ‘scribbling’ (probationes pennae, p. 311), signatures added by successive users/readers/owners of the texts (p. 202), line-by-line vernacular (Italian) translations inserted into the original Latin text (‘interlinear vernacular glossing’, p. 276, see also pp. 327–328), and the existence of grammatical and textual comment—paraphrases or explications—inserted around the original text (p. 327). Black’s painstaking reporting includes an awareness of the fluidity that surrounded the preparation and use of successive versions of texts. Medieval authors, that is, restructured texts for various reasons. As copyists as much as authors, they highlighted different aspects of grammar, they converted prose into verse (and vice versa); they responded to the wishes of their individual or corporate employers and, not least, they adjusted their texts according to the prevailing ‘needs of teaching’ (Black, p. 101). In responding to these needs, purveyors of learning turned into schoolmasters who, in turn, remodelled the material context of instruction. Orme, for instance, provides the following remodelling information, derived from his own data on English sources: • The earliest purpose-built schoolroom was included in the erection of Winchester school at the end of the fourteenth century (p. 138). • The school day in free-standing institutions is not detailed until the mid-fifteenth century when the statutes of endowed schools began to lay down how the day should function (p. 143). • The earliest recorded use of school-owned printed schoolbooks is 1498 (p. 155). • The earliest ‘detailed evidence’ about a schoolroom is 1518 (p. 139). • The division of schools into permanent classes is not mentioned until the 1520s (p. 143). • The earliest school notebooks date from ‘soon after 1400’ (p. 111). • The earliest surviving school timetables date from between 1528 and 1530 (p. 123). Throughout his text, however, Orme carefully emphasized the uncertainty of such summary conclusions. He was well aware that his evidence might be ‘weaker than desirable’ (p. 48) and that ‘our knowledge of medieval schools is accidental [i.e. due to the chance survival of documentary evidence]’ (p. 189). Despite using rhetorical phrases like ‘it is possible that’ (p. 26), ‘it may be significant that’ (p. 45) and ‘[it] is difficult to say’ (p. 29), his data cumulatively suggest that schooling was beginning to take its modern shape in the latter part of the Middle Ages. Indeed, Orme summarizes his position as follows: Schooling … was a trade which (especially in the later Middle Ages) teachers were left alone to practise and parents to patronise. It was an everyday thing that was taken for granted. These attitudes persisted until well into

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the sixteenth century. Only with the coming of the Reformation was the role of schools reassessed as something crucial to the good of Church and state. (p. 204)

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Reform and reformation What changes, then, were associated with the 16th-century Reformation? In England, questions about ‘what was happening?’ and ‘why was it happening?’ are still difficult to adjudicate, having been debated at length by educationists and historian (see, for instance, the review in Moran, 1985, Chapter 1, and Orme’s ‘Reflections’, 2006, Chapter 11). Nevertheless, Moran’s conclusion about the politics of education and schooling seem to reflect the general view that educational practice shifted its attention away from regimes sponsored by the established church. ‘It is clear’, she wrote in the 1980s, that by 1500 ‘the late medieval clergy no longer dominated the educational sphere or even the educated elite’. ‘As a result’, she adds, these changes ‘may have ultimately worked to the disadvantage of the Church’ (1985, p. 226). Her judgement, therefore, hints at the rise of a new, lay elite who sought to extend their power by intervening in two areas of schooling: (1) state or corporate regulation of schoolteachers; and (2) standardization of the conduct of schools. Further, support for this thesis can be found outside the framework of Moran’s investigation—from at least three separate sources. First, there is the evidence that the words syllabus, class, curriculum and didactics took their modern form across Europe after 1500 (see, variously, Hamilton, 1989, 2002, 2009; Martial, 1985). If nothing else, such ideas provided a discursive framework for the institutionalization of schooling that was easily communicated, disseminated and adopted. Secondly, this discourse resonated with the wider political intentions of reformers like Luther and Calvin. As the current Oxford University Professor of Early Modern Intellectual History suggested: The project of indoctrinating and disciplining an entire population had never been undertaken with the seriousness with which it was being attempted around 1580, and for this new project a different approach to education was needed. (Hotson, 2000, pp. 23–24)

And a final contribution to Moran’s hypothesis is the evidence and argument of Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine’s From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth-century Europe (1986). Like other authors, they focus on the transformation of instruction, examining the teaching of the humanities (viz. classical literature) in the period between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Like Black and Grendler, they note that Italian purveyors of knowledge (grammar teachers) had begun to turn away from medieval scholastic sources in favour of classical authors like Cicero. This infusion of classical (or humanist) ideas created a situation where, Black suggests:

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In antiquity only one language was being taught, but now during the Renaissance in effect two languages were involved: first the pupil learned medieval Latin from the grammarians and then classical Latin from the humanists. (Black, 2001, p. 365)

Grafton and Jardine’s thesis is that the needs of teaching addressed by humanist tutors, like Guarino Guarini (1374–1460), suffered in a tension between scholasticism (medieval practice) and humanism, with humanism suffering as a consequence. The ‘development of a systematized programme of arts training in Northern Europe out of the cumulative and unstructured educational practice of early Italian humanism … led to a convenient confusion of the “methodical” with the “morally sound”’ (1986, p. 149). Was the goal of education to make a student a born-again ‘new man’? Or was it merely the ‘transmission of necessary literary skills’ (pp. 3–4). To illustrate their standpoint, Grafton and Jardine offer case studies of two tutors, one of whom offered ‘intimate attention to individual boys’ while the other merely ‘drew up daily timetables’ (p. 151). Insofar as such instruction by schoolteachers offered an ‘instrumental and pragmatic brand of humanism’, the humanist aspirations of the Renaissance were blunted. To illustrate this aspect of their thesis, Grafton and Jardine cite Quintilian’s classical ideal of the orator as a ‘a good man, who excels in the art of discourse’, suggesting that this humanist goal was replaced by an image of the pragmatic orator—someone who merely gathers ‘concrete facts’ which serve as the intellectual ‘ammunition’ basic to public erudition (pp. xiii, 197, 192 and 188n). As a result, teaching derived from humanist sources no longer carried the expectation that successful students would be good and pious men. Through these changes, humanism mutated into the humanities, ‘a study of the art of speaking, rather than of knowing’. Humanist qualities of ‘learnedness’ or ‘philosophical understanding’ faded in the wake of the textualization of humanism and the associated creation of school courses (Grafton & Jardine, 1986, p. 194, 195; Ong, 1958, passim). Indeed, Grafton & Jardine suggest humanism ceased to be the emblem of a ‘good man’; instead, it merely offering ‘a route to high government office’ (p. 189). Anticipating Hotson, they also note that such erudition was ‘made to order for the Europe of the Counter-Reformation and of late Protestant orthodoxy’ (p. xiv). Grafton and Jardine’s ideas have been criticized by other Renaissance historians (see, for instance, Black, 2001, p. 17) but there is no doubt that, through the sixteenth century, the form and language of schooling began to crystallize into an institution easily recognized with the hindsight available to 21st-century educationists. The late-medieval innovations identified by Orme were captured in texts, adopted by teachers and disseminated from school to school. In short, ‘purveyors of learning’ eventually became both the carriers and the victims of standardization and normalization. And their efforts mark the beginnings of modern schooling.

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Standardization and normalization Such changes, however, were not instantaneous. A sense of their scale and form can be gleaned from the educational writings of Richard Mulcaster (c1531–1611). According to his most recent biographer— Jacqueline Cousin-Desjobert (2013, pp. 22–23)—Mulcaster was born in Carlisle in the north of England, attended Eton College, went on to King’s College and Peterhouse College, Cambridge University and spent a year at Christ’s College, Oxford University. Continuing his studies in Greek and Hebrew, he also became a Burgess and member of the first English Parliament of Elisabeth I in 1559 (which lasted four months). While living in London, he married the daughter of a spice merchant and occupied himself as a schoolmaster. His success in the last activity was sufficiently newsworthy for him to become the first head master of Merchant Taylors’ school (1561–1583) and, after running a boarding house for girls and serving as a tutor/schoolmaster elsewhere, head of St Paul’s school, also in London (1596–1608). Mulcaster’s experiences at the Merchant Taylors’ school are reflected in two texts: (1) Positions, Wherein those Primitive Circumstances be Examined, Which are Necessary for the Training up of Children, Either for Skill in their Book, or Health in their Bodie (1581/1995, hereafter Positions) and (2) The First Part of the Elementarie which Entreaties Chefelie of the Right Writing of our English Tung (1582/1970, hereafter Elementarie). Like many books produced in the sixteenth century, Mulcaster’s texts were not paradigms of standardization. They were not only repetitious but, despite Gutenberg, also typeset with many errors and eccentricities. Taken together, they comprised an educational intervention spread over 576 printed pages divided in two parts ‘chiefly for the printer’ (Elementarie, epistle). Mulcaster, however, was more than an erudite schoolmaster serving a London elite. His erudition was emblematic of something else. In the second half of the sixteenth century, as Cousin-Desjobert notes, ‘it is impossible to disassociate … an erudite grammar-school teacher from the influence of contemporaneous humanist currents’ (2013, p. 9). Like many of his northern European peers, Mulcaster not only corresponded in several languages, he also linked his humanist interests to the reform and reaffirmation of Protestant practice—a major initiative of the early years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign (1558–1603). To overcome the religious schisms that had troubled the first half of the sixteenth century, the English Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy (1558), which confirmed the Church of England’s separation from Rome; and the Act of Uniformity (1559) which, among other things, required the English population to attend church on Sundays using the Book of Common Prayer—a protestant, English-language liturgy. The new forms of worship took time to become routine but, by 1580, Mulcaster had come to accept that reform of educational practice was central to the Protestant project. And his contribution to educational thought and protestant practice was refracted through his prolonged experience as a schoolmaster. His contribution, that is, can be contrasted with the earlier efforts of Thomas Elyot (c1490–1546) who published the The Book Named the Governour in 1531/1962 and Roger Ascham (1518–1568), who

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published The Scholemaster in 1570/1898 (i.e. posthumously). Elyot and Ascham, of an earlier generation than Mulcaster, wrote for different audiences. Elyot’s volume was directed towards elite families—the source of future governors while Ascham’s volume was ‘specially prepared’ for the ‘private bringing up of youth in gentlemen and noblemen’s houses’ (title page). Ascham’s use of schoolmaster in his title might appear misleading but it was consonant with the medieval idea that the community of schoolmasters could be seen as a guild, if only because they shared the same goal (teaching Latin) and used similar tools (texts designed for that purpose). Nevertheless, such self-claimed (medieval?) schoolmasters were not exempt from Ascham’s criticism. Their work meant that young people were ‘driven to hate learning, before they know what learning is’ and that their ‘love of learning’ was being extinguished by their ‘fear of beating’. Ascham’s reformed and humanist ‘scholemaster’ was to provide the ‘right order of teaching, and honesty of living, for the good upbringing of children and young men’ and, in doing so, was expected to fill the gap between childhood and such time as the ‘the scholar is made able to go to the university’ (preface). Besides their humanist concerns, all three authors—Elyot, Ascham and Mulcaster—had something else in common. Their writings celebrated the ideal of the ‘common weal’ (an English translation of Res Publica). Each believed that education or schooling could make a contribution to the organization, regulation and governance of the public sphere. While Elyot highlighted the training of governors and Ascham wrote for noble men, Mulcaster’s educational proposals were focused elsewhere. His discussions, opinions and proposals were directed, on the one hand, at members of the emergent, urban mercantile and commercial elites and, on the other hand, at promoting learning as a means of extending the ‘soul of a state’ (Positions, p. 135). Given the complexity of Reformation politics in England, educational writings of the sixteenth century appealed to different audiences, each struggling to revise or reform the changing boundaries of the commonwealth, itself buffeted by the growth of mercantilism, corporatism, empire and colonialism. It is no accident that the phrase ‘British Empire’ was first used by an adviser to Queen Elisabeth, John Dee, in 1577 (see Ronald, 2007, p. 20). Ascham had been tutor to Princess Elizabeth—the future Queen of England; and Elyot had served as adviser to the Monarch and as ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor. But Mulcaster merely served as a member of the House of Commons—a lower rank in the national hierarchy. Despite his origins and upbringing, Mulcaster was writing as much for a metropolitan as a landed or clerical audience. The Company of Merchant Taylors founded its school in 1561, having receiving a fresh Royal Charter in 1503, one that upgraded its status to a merchant, international, trading company from a craft guild (of ‘Tailors and Linen armourers’) originally founded in 1327. In a similar way, St Pauls School —which began life as a cathedral school—was refounded in 1512, with the Mercers’ (luxury cloth merchants) Company providing its corporate trustees.

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Method, order and efficiency Mulcaster’s extensive writings also constitute a window on many aspects of 16th-century life—Cousin-Desjobert’s biography, for instance, originated as a doctorate in Renaissance studies. My intention in this essay is, however, relatively narrow: to exploit Mulcaster’s focus on the changing regime of 16th-century English schooling, particularly as it underwent reform to serve the political, social and confessional interests of Elizabethan Protestantism. On the basis of his two major texts, five issues seem to have been uppermost in Mulcaster’s mind: (1) reducing diversity to a uniform provision; (2) strengthening the idea that public schooling should serve the common weal; (3) extending schooling further into the ‘common[s]’; (4) advancing secularization through the use of vernacular languages; and (5) developing the idea that concepts of method and order are central to the organization of schooling. Converting diversity into uniformity appears to have been the strongest of Mulcaster’s concerns. He returned to it repeatedly. The existing ‘great variety of teaching’, he believed, ‘seems to call for some uniform way’ (Positions, p. 5). ‘The very end of my whole labour’ he wrote in the dedication to Queen Elizabeth I, ‘is to help to bring the general teaching in your majesty’s dominions, to some one good and profitable uniformity’. By such action he believed he was augmenting the work of ‘that noble prince King Henry VIII’, who had reigned 1509–1547, and who had ‘vouchsafed to bring all grammars into one form, the multitude thereof being some impediment to school learning’. Mulcaster’s views on uniformity also extended to schoolbooks and instruction. There is value, he added in the dedication, in ‘reducing all other school books to some better choice; and all manner of teaching, to some readier form’. Mulcaster’s view of uniform teaching was politically-motivated, echoing the aspiration of the Act of Uniformity. Reform or redirection was needed along a ‘right way’ (Elementarie, p. 100). Learners should follow a course of life, a direction that, with the ‘limiting of things’, comprised ‘what to do and what to learn, how to do and how to learn, where, when, and so forth to do that, which signs [represents] the behaviour, and to learn that which enhances knowledge’ (Positions, p. 291). Uniformity also carried a sense of certainty. Children are ‘of themselves … ignorant’ such that they must have ‘certainty to direct them’ and that this ‘certainty must especially be set sure, and not less soundly kept, in schools for learning, in private houses for behaviour, in churches for religion, because those three places, be the greatest abodes, that children have’ (Positions, p. 291). Overall, ‘certainty in direction’ would create a ‘marvellous profitable kind of regime’ (Positions, p. 293). Accordingly, Mulcaster’s view of the common weal resonated with a view of Protestant uniformity or orthodoxy. To this end, he seems to have made a distinction between ‘public ordinance’ and ‘private discipline at home’ (Positions, p. 29); that is, between the regulation of public and private life. The common weal embraced the public sphere. It operated as a ‘ship’ with the people as its passengers (Positions, p. 245). Moreover, Mulcaster felt that public learning strengthened the viability of the ship of

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state. When learning has been acquired, it ‘spreads throughout the state as sinews, veins and arteries do through a natural body’ (Elementarie, p. 233). And in the epistle written for the Elementarie, Mulcaster added that ‘peacefulness is the end of all government, as learning is the mean[s]’. Mulcaster’s position was that schooling provides more than domestic education. Even though ‘a wife and a learned parent’ are the ‘very best part of the very best teacher’ (Elementarie, p. 5), schooling underpins the preparation of learned citizens who can ‘serve abroad’ [i.e. in the public sphere] in the ‘public functions of the common weal’ (Elementarie, epistle). In other words, Mulcaster believed that public learning had the ‘force of common use’ (Elementarie, p. 101) and served ‘for the good of us all’ (Elementarie, p. 235). Mulcaster, however, was not an advocate of universal schooling. While accepting that all, including ‘young maidens’, should be ‘put to learn’ such that ‘all may learn to write and read without danger’ (Positions, p. 132), he expressed ‘two great doubts’ about the existence of ‘too many learned’ (Positions, pp. 133, 134). He felt that the ‘male side’ should be ‘set to school’ but worried whether this prescription be applied to ‘all children’ and, if not, what should be the basis of selection (Positions, p. 133)? ‘For the male side’, however, his view was clear: That doubt is long ago out of doubt; they should be set to school, to qualify themselves, to learn how to be religious and loving, how to govern and obey, how to forecast and prevent how to defend and assail and in short, how to perform that excellently by labour, whereunto they are born but rudely by nature. (Positions, p. 133)

Mulcaster’s primary interest, it seems, was not universal schooling, but in extending learning to the ‘middle sort of parent’, those who were neither in possession of ‘too much wealth’ nor struggling with ‘too much want’ (Positions, p. 140). He described this social constituency as ‘the common’ (e.g. Positions, p. 194). This label dates from 1341 when the Parliament of England divided itself into two chambers or houses. Henceforth, the House of Commons, was occupied by knight and burgesses (urban office-holders) who met separately from the House of Lords occupied by members of the Nobility and Clergy. Although Mulcaster served in the House of Commons before writing his major texts, he was not opposed to the House of Lords or the Monarchy. His life as a schoolmaster had merely led him, I suggest, to the view that the pedagogy advocated by Asham and Elyot was insufficient to the mercantile circumstances of the sixteenth century. But this connection between commerce and schooling was nothing new. It was already marked in Lorenzetti’s 14th-centry Allegory, and Orme comments that ‘a common location’ for medieval schools was a ‘street on the edge of the commercial sector’ (2006, p. 136). The main difference, however, between medieval and 16th-century practice has already been touched upon. Public schooling had become a corporate rather than a craft concern; and such corporate activity was linked to the acquisition and consolidation of political power. Mulcaster’s view was that the knowledge (or cultural capital) previously offered to families of the

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nobility should not only be reformed (i.e. brought up to date) but also extended to members of the ‘common’. To this end, Mulcaster’s writings devote much attention to social status and social structure in the sixteenth century. What, for instance, does it mean to be a gentleman or nobleman (see, e.g. Positions, pp. 193ff.)? Mulcaster’s educational argument seems to be that the knowledge conventionally associated with the nobility (e.g. skills in horsemanship, dance and weaponry, Positions, p. 198) should be extended to such learning that would ‘serve’ the ‘honour of our state and country’ (Positions, p. 197). A ‘good and virtuous education’ was necessary to create a new variety of ‘noble and gentleman’. Such learning, spread among both the commons and the nobility, should promote ‘wisdom in policy, valiance in execution, justice in deciding [and] modesty in demeanour’ (Positions, pp. 201, 200). In turn, such ‘gentlemanly qualities’ would also be implicated in members of the commons if they could ‘read, write, draw, sing, play, to have language, learning, health and activity, nay even to profess divinity, law, physics and any trade else commendable for cunning [knowledge or erudition]’ (Positions, p. 208). A further consequence of Mulcaster’s views on public schooling was his advocacy of vernacular instruction. His membership of an international network of aware and/or exiled humanists, together with his sponsorship by merchant guilds allowed him to appreciate the integration of England into Europe and, at the same time, the gradual inclusion of other languages, besides Latin, into the workings of the common weal: ‘No tongue is naturally more fine than any other but by the industry of the speaker’ (Elementarie, p. 253). He was writing at a time when Machiavelli (1469–1527) had written The Prince in Italian and Montaigne (1533–1592) had published his Essais in French in 1580. Mulcaster felt that ‘diligent labour of learned countrymen’ could be applied to learning any language. ‘Why not, I pray you’, he asks, ‘as well in English as either in Latin or any other tongue’ (Elementarie, p. 255). Indeed, his final comment is ‘Why not all in English, a tongue of itself both deep in conceit [conception], and frank in delivery?’ (Elementarie, p. 258). The fifth and final recurrent theme in Mulcaster’s work is his attention to the organization of school instruction. He ‘ventured’ into print, he suggests, to help the ‘course of learning’ and to help the ‘trade of teaching’ (Elementarie, p. 234). To do this, he built on his humanist connections and marshalled the ‘best authority’ of classical sources. His experience as a schoolmaster had taught him that the ‘ordinary and old’ course of elementary instruction would be difficult to ‘turn’ and would ‘not lightly be changed’ (Elementarie, pp. 8, 7, 6). Mulcaster’s views embraced not only the purpose of schooling but also its conduct. Building on the orthodox aspirations of the English Reformation, his proposed regime of instruction—his ‘general platform’— emphasized the leitmotif of pan-European reforms in education and schooling: ‘method and order’ (Elementarie, p. 52). Like other Europeans who wrote at the same time (reported in Ong, 1958, Chapter 11: The method of method), Mulcaster sought to increase the efficiency of

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schooling. His premise was that if the ‘teacher may deliver plainly with order’, it would inevitably follow that the ‘learner [may] receive quickly with profit’ (Elementarie, p. 53). Mulcaster felt that this reorganization of teaching was possible because ‘our custom [way of life] has grown so orderable’ (Elementarie, p. 78) such that ‘all the principle[s?] may be well learned singly, in their natural order’ (Elementarie, p. 233). Although not acknowledged, this belief in the natural order of things echoes the taxonomic or systematic ordering of nature proposed by Peter Ramus (1515–1572), a professor at the University of Paris whose writings influenced the emergence of the curriculum idea. Ramus’ contribution to the work of schoolmasters was twofold. First, he created a map of knowledge which identified designated elements of learning. Secondly, he linked these elements hierarchically— in the same way that knowledge can be divided into arts and sciences each of which can be subdivided further (e.g. into physics, chemistry and biology) and further still (e.g. physical chemistry and organic chemistry). Thus, for Ramus and his followers (discussed in Hotson, 2007), teaching or learning of a curriculum entailed examining these topics and, in turn, linking them to other saliences on the map of knowledge. In effect, Ramus advanced a fundamental curriculum idea—that instruction is based on following a course that makes connections across a map of knowledge. And it is for this reason, perhaps, that Mulcaster believed that schooling should not be distracted by ‘diverse things’ and, instead, be based on an orderable practice which would ‘assure the profit without loss of time or lingering by the way’ (Elementarie, p. 234). To summarize, it is not easy to discern Mulcaster’s motivation but it seems that he offered a curricular view of schooling deeply informed by considerations about method, order, discipline and efficiency. He drew these considerations from, among other things, humanist and reformation reappraisals of theology, philosophy and politics. Mediated in different ways by the diverse circumstances of the European Reformation, a central concern of schoolteachers became sharing the ‘organization of the matter they were teaching’ (Ong, 1958, p. 228).

Schooling across Europe Three other international innovations illustrate how this concern was addressed in the sixteenth century: reformulation of the word ‘method’, creation of the Jesuit’s Ratio studiorum, and reform of the Christian catechism. For many years, the word method had denoted the elaboration of logical procedures for the creation and accumulation of new knowledge. Medieval scholasticism, for instance, is sometimes represented in terms of its extended, if not tortuous, methodological argumentation. For Renaissance teachers, however, the idea of method took a new turn. It referred to the convergent reorganization of teaching—its reduction, in extreme cases, to a ‘savage simplicity’ (Ong, 1958, p. 235). In one sense, this arose from a remapping of the logical pathways to knowledge proposed

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by Peter Ramus, an innovator remembered by the American Renaissance scholar, Hardin Craig, as the ‘greatest master of the short-cut the world has ever known’ (see Ong, 1958, p. 3). Thus, Johannes Sturm (1507–1589), Lutheran Rector of Strasburg Gymnasium in the middle years of the sixteenth century, came to regard method as a ‘certain, short and direct way, a kind of short cut … which is simple, and clear, and straightforward’. Method, therefore, was reduced to a recipe—a ‘routine of efficiency’ that became central to the organization of didactics (see Ong, 1958, pp. 232–233, 225; Gilbert, 1960). In one case, reported by Jill Kraye, an Oldenburg (North Germany) schoolmaster, Georg Andreas Fabricius (1589–1694), methodically reorganized his teaching so that students would acquire ‘all human knowledge in little over a year’ (Kraye, 1995, p. 110). With Ramus’ assistance, method had become the message as well as the medium. The second notable innovation of the sixteenth century was the creation of the Ratio Studiorum by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). Taking more than 50 years to prepare, the authorized version of the Ratio Studiorum, issued in 1599, was a scheme of studies or schooling based on procedural rules for individual officials and classes that, according to Mir (1968), had its origins in the ‘Modus Parisiensis’ developed in the University of Paris, a century earlier. By that stage in their history, missions of the Society of Jesus had already reached beyond Europe to Japan, China, India and Brazil. European schooling, that is, had begun to go global. The final significant 16th-century innovation entailed the reform of catechesis or educational questioning. Teaching based on standard questions—often directed at biblical knowledge—was much older (see, for instance, Rouche, 2003, p. 252). But the influential innovation of the 1500s was the standardization of the answers as well as the questions. Catechesis was turned from a questioning to a questioning-and-answering practice (see, for instance, Green, 1996; Dhotel, 1967). Accordingly, such practices served the diverse theological and political aims embodied in Luther’s Little Catechism (1529), the Calvinist Heidelberg Catechism (1563) and the catholic Summa Doctrinae Christianae (or Catechismus Major, 1554). Adoption of reformation catechisms not only enhanced the efficiency of oral and written instruction but also created a format for the production of schoolbooks. Subsequently, for instance, a 19th-century schoolmaster/bookseller, William Pinnock (1782–1843), produced a series of catechisms in the nineteenth century that, among other things, covered the fields of English grammar, French grammar, singing, geology and chess. Overall, my suggestion is that these interconnected developments in the sixteenth century contributed to the idea that schooling could be organized around rational and fail-safe methods. Efficiently-delivered instruction would necessarily yield the desired effect—erudition. Through such reform, schooling would ceased to be undermined by the diversity allowed—wittingly or unwittingly—by medieval purveyors of learning. Henceforth, schooling was idealized as a totalising project, the foundational assumption of Johann Amos Comenius’ Didactica Magna—a work completed in the middle years of the seventeenth century. Between

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Ramus (1515–1572) and Comenius (1592–1670), schooling had become reformed as an institution for ‘teaching all things to all men’ using methods ‘by which teachers may teach less, but learners may learn more’ (Comenius, 1635/1967, title page and fly sheets). These assumptions about the delivery of knowledge nourished the origins, ideology and appeal of modern schooling. Despite many problems, including the growth of knowledge through the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, these assumptions survived. Mediated by the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century, they underpinned the creation of popular schooling in the early years of the nineteenth century and reigned supreme at least until the twentieth century. Conclusion This essay offers an account of the beginnings of modern schooling—as we know it. It arises from a sustained effort to fill the gap that lies between 9th-century uses of the Latin word schola and the 16th-century creation of the lexicon of modern schooling. It acknowledges that, after the eighth century the label ‘school’ began to be associated with the textualization of inherited knowledge, a process that initiated the separation of education from schooling (examined further in Hamilton & Zufiaurre, 2013). In turn, the existence of textual knowledge promoted the growth of an instructional literature repeatedly adapted and recycled by successive generations of purveyors of knowledge. And, by the end of the fifteenth century, the diversity of instructional practices followed by the teachers of Latin began to be codified as part of a European lexicon of schooling. Finally, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this codification was further strengthened, leading, for instance, to Comenius’ belief in the Great Didactic. Evidence for this argument is drawn largely from secondary and Anglophone sources. Accordingly, my interpretations should be read more as an invitation than a conclusion. The investigation remains unfinished. There is a need to rework Orme’s medieval sources according to Black’s standards; there is undoubted merit in penetrating further in the politics of the Reformation; and it is worth focusing more closely on Mulcaster’s texts by comparing them, for instance, with 17th-century equivalents such as John Brinsley’s Ludus Literarius: or, the Grammar Schoole (1612/1968), Charles Hoole’s, A New Discovery Of The Old Art Of Teaching Schoole (1660/1969) and parallel European and North American texts. The question mark in the title of this essay should, therefore, be read as an indication of uncertainty. In parallel with Hopmann’s conjectures about the end of schooling, many questions about the beginning of schooling still remain provisional. Their resolution, at least for this author, is likely to require another lifetime’s work. Meanwhile, if this essay provokes others to reconceptualize and recalibrate education and schooling, it will have been worth writing.

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Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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