EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING. It is often stated that the roots of all our modern educational practices in secondary education lie buried deep in the great Italian Revival of Learning. If we limit the statement to the time preceding the middle of the nineteenth century we shall be more nearly correct, as tremendous changes in both the character and the purpose of secondary education have taken place since that time. The important and outstanding educational result of the revival of ancient learning by Italian scholars was that it laid a basis for a new type of education below that of the university, destined in time to be much more widely opened to promising youths than the old cathedral and monastic schools had been. This new education, based on the great intellectual inheritance recovered from the ancient world by a relatively small number of Italian scholars, dominated the secondary-school training of the middle and higher classes of society for the next four hundred years. It clearly began by 1450, it clearly controlled secondary education until at least after 1850. Out of the efforts of Italian scholars to resurrect, reconstruct, understand, and utilize in education the fruits of their legacy from the ancient Greek and Roman world, arose modern secondary education, as contrasted with mediaeval church education.
Mediaeval education, after all, was narrowly technical. It prepared for but one profession, and one type of service. There was little that was liberal, cultural, or humanitarian about it. It prepared for the world to come, not for the world men live in here. The new education developed in Italy aimed to prepare directly for life in the world here, and for useful and enjoyable life at that. Combining with the new humanistic (cultural) studies the best ideals and practices of the old chivalric education-- physical training, manners and courtesy, reverence--the Italian pioneers devised a scheme of education, below that of the universities, which they claimed prepared youths not only for an intellectual appreciation of the great and wonderful past of which they were descendants, but also for intelligent service in the two great non-church occupations of Italy in the fifteenth century--public service for the City-State, and commerce and a business life. This new type of education spread to other lands, and a new type of secondary-school training, actuated by a new and a modern purpose, thus came out of the revival of learning in Italy.