English scholars gathered in thousands at Paris round the chairs of William of Champeanx or Abélard, where they took their place as one of the "nations" of which the great middle-age university of Paris was composed.
We have only to do with the arts faculty of this university. We find that the subject-matter of the liberal education of the middle age there dealt with varied very little from that taught in the schools of ancient Rome.
The so-called "artiens," students of the arts faculty, which was the glory of the university and the one most numerously attended, studied the seven arts of the trivium and quadrivium—that is, grammar, rhetoric, dialectic and arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy.[1]
This at first looks well for scientific study, but the mathematics taught had much to do with magic; arithmetic dealt with epacts, golden numbers, and the like. There was no algebra, and no mechanics. Astronomy dealt with the system of the seven heavens.
Science, indeed, was the last thing to be considered in the theological and legal studia, and it would appear that it was kept alive more in the medical schools than in the arts faculties. Aristotle's writings on physics, biology, and astronomy were not known till about 1230, and then in the shape of Arab-Latin translations. Still, it must not be forgotten that Dante learned some of his astronomy, at all events, at Paris.
Oxford was an offshoot of Paris, and therefore a theological studium, in all probability founded about 1167,[2] and Cambridge came later.
Not till the Reformation (sixteenth century) do we see any sign of a new educational wave, and then we find the two which have had the greatest influence upon the history of the world—one of them depending upon the Reformation itself, the other depending upon the birth of experimental inquiry.
Before the Reformation the universities were priestly institutions, and derived their authority from the Popes.
The universities were for the few; the education of the people, except in the various crafts, was unprovided for.
The idea of a general education in secular subjects at the expense of the state or of communities is coeval with the Reformation. In Germany, even before the time of Luther, it was undreamed of, or rather, perhaps, one should say, the question was decided in the negative. In his day, however, his zeal first made itself heard in favor of education, as many are now making themselves heard in
