Studies in the History of Educational Theory Vol 1 (RLE Edu H)

Nature and Artifice, 1350-1765

G Bantock

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136591273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book examines key theorists in depth in order to give some insight into cultural change as reflected in their curricular recommendations and in the interplay they reveal between the two fundamental educational concepts of 'artifice' and 'nature'. The essays on the various theorists – Erasmus, Vives, Castiglione, Elyot, Montaigne, Bacon, Comenius, Locke and Rousseau can be read separately but the book also forms an integrated whole, with a continuity of themes explored from theorist to theorist. The book not only charts a historical development but also reveals much that may deepen our understanding of contemporary educational dilemmas.

PART ONE

The Humanists: ‘Words’

CHAPTER 1

‘A Chattering Flock’:
the Humanist Experience

I

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a group of Italian intellectuals advocated a changed image of the educated man and an altered purpose for education from that which had prevailed in previous times. They included men like Pietro Paulo Vergerius (1349–1420), author of De Ingenuis Moribus (The Education of the Noble Man) and one of the first of the new educational theorists, Guarino da Verona (1374–1460), who settled in Verona as a Master of Rhetoric, Vittorino da Feltre (1378–1446) who taught in Padua and later, at the request of the Duke of Mantua, established one of the first great schools of the Renaissance, Leonardo Bruni d'Arezzo (1370–1444), former Papal Secretary, who became Chancellor of Florence and historian of the Florentine people, and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who became Pope Pius II and died in 1464. All of them wrote on education and helped to initiate a revolution in content which focused attention on the studia humanitatis ¹(thus earning for themselves the name of humanists) and rhetoric in place of the theological and logical concerns of the scholastics who for so long had dominated much of European education. It is true that the scholastics had not been as ubiquitous in Italy, where the rhetorical tradition was stronger, as they were in the European countries north of the Alps. Nevertheless the humanists, though increasingly well placed in the state bureaucracies of the small Italian principalities and republics, attracted some criticism even in the country where conditions were most favourable to them. A Florentine patrician with literary interests, Cino Rinucci, dismissed those in his own city as a ‘chattering flock’,² ridiculed their concern with the niceties of language and defended scholastic pursuits. What was the quarrel all about?

II

The pre-industrial and especially the pre-print world made the arts of communication central aspects of its educational curriculum. As I am speaking in this respect of a period stretching from classical times until at least the end of the Renaissance it would be surprising if there was unanimity during that length of time as to how exactly these arts were to be defined. Grammar – the broad structural aspects of language, in this case Latin – certainly laid the foundations, but the status of the two major more advanced linguistic disciplines – logic, with which dialectic was usually but not in-variably associated, and rhetoric – was more in doubt. Between them they constituted the medieval and renaissance trivium – the arts of Words which provided the content of the basic curriculum. (The quadrivium – arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music – was usually reserved for higher education; the trivium was undertaken in at least some measure at school.) Occasionally the definitions of these two more advanced basic studies would suggest that some degree of integration between them was possible and indeed desirable; but, in general, they were regarded as distinct fields of discourse, with definably different functions even though the sheer complexity of human communication did on occasion necessitate a degree of overlap and, indeed, interaction. (Altogether they made up the seven liberal arts.)

Both logic and rhetoric claimed to deal with ‘reality’. Logic was the tool of the schoolmen. ‘Scholasticism’, indeed, refers to the method rather than the content of medieval philosophy; it constituted ‘a method of discovering and illustrating philosophical truth by means of a dialectic based on Aristotelian logic’.³ A major characteristic of the method was the use of disputation by means of which questions were posed and arguments deployed, often through the agency of the logical device of the syllogism. Initially in the scholastic period philosophy was very closely bound to theology, and was employed largely for the purpose of reconciling, by rational means, philosophical postulates with the truths of revelation. Gradually philosophy gained its independence and became an autonomous discipline without any necessary reference to theology. Nevertheless, the general character of scholastic thought remained tied to divine truth and Christian ethics, regarding itself as being, in an explanatory and apologetic capacity, the means by which the reality of divine revelations could be sustained by reason. Methodologically, however, the scholastic approach became increasingly arid; it remained dependent on authoritative texts, employing devices such as deduction and inference to establish the truth of statements concerned with a transcendental reality with which, for instance, it sought to reconcile relevant facts of empirical behaviour. Its discourse was adapted to convince men of intellectual calibre and scholastic training and had little popular appeal. Scholastic logic, indeed, which continued in the hands of the schoolmen to form a rival discipline to the rhetoric of the humanists, was marked by deference to authority manifest in a limited number of texts, an increasingly stiff and highly formalised methodology and a particular concern for the logical methods of Aristotle. It was the intellectual instrument of an ecclesiological civilisation which helped to sustain a hierarchical, God-given social structure.

Rhetoric, the object of humanist study, was much more popularly oriented:

Rhetoric was … regarded as the theory behind the statements intended for the populace. Since the populace consisted of laymen, or of people not learned in the subject being treated by a speaker or a writer, and since the speaker or writer by his very office was to some extent a master of the real technicalities of his subject, rhetoric was regarded as the theory of communication between the learned and the lay world, or between expert and layman.⁴

Its highest purpose was to persuade contemporaries to moral truths with a view to the harmonious and fruitful conduct of civic life. As a technique it was influenced greatly by Cicero, though of course it was modified and added to by numerous subsequent advocates of the ‘art’. It involved an analytic approach which examined the intended discourse from the point of view of invention (the process of discovering valid arguments and material to render a case plausible), arrangement (the structuring of a discourse), style, delivery and memory. (‘Style’ and ‘delivery’ are broadly self-explanatory within the persuasive framework which constituted the raison d’être of rhetoric. The role of ‘memory’ will be discussed later.) Aristotle defined rhetoric as the art of ‘discovering in the particular case what are the available means of persuasion’.

But the dilemma the humanists faced was the extent to which rhetoric was to be involved simply with techniques of persuasion (following the Greek Sophists) or was to concern itself with matters of content drawn from a study of philosophy (by which they meant moral philosophy) and human learning. Clearly, discourse could be directed to bad ends; it needed refining, therefore, by knowledge and moral purpose and insight. Yet as its appeal was intended to be popular, limits were placed by the capacity of the audience to comprehend ethical positions, an understanding of which often needed an ability to transcend mere opinion or customary belief. Cicero had found himself in the same dilemma; his opening affirmation in the De Inventione, that wisdom without eloquence was of little use in civic life, though eloquence separate from wisdom was often of great harm,⁵ was frequently quoted by later writers. Yet philosophy spoke only to the expert – a restricted audience.

On the one hand, then, the humanists were committed to the persuasions of eloquence; on the other the more sensitive of them realised that eloquence, in needing to speak a persuasive popular language, might involve falsities and untruths.

In general the solution they adopted was similar to that of Cicero and Quintilian. They stressed the importance of philosophy and knowledge, but on occasions accepted a somewhat more relaxed ethical stance than in their hearts they knew to be justified. Essentially, however, they remained moralists with that knowledgeable concern for reality in social and political relations that moralists at best demonstrate; they sought the learned orator (doctus orator) who had acquired moral insight on a basis of cultivation. Thus Leonardo Bruni in De Studiis et Literis (On Study and Letters) in repudiating the aridity of contemporary scholasticism is at pains to stress the need for ‘true learning’:

For true learning has almost died away among us. True learning, I say: not a mere acquaintance with that vulgar, threadbare, jargon which satisfies those who devote themselves to Theology, but sound learning in its proper and legitimate sense, viz. the knowledge of realities – Facts and Principles – united to a perfect familiarity with Letters and the art of expression.⁶

Truth, ‘realities’, then, were the pursuits of the humanists as well as of their rivals.

Yet those ‘realities’ were comprised of very different components. The scholastics were little concerned with empirical fact; they subordinated close observation to the need to reconcile behaviour with a divine teleology. The humanists were increasingly immersed in the world of a purely human experience; they became more neglectful in the elaboration of metaphysical explanations.

Both logic and rhetoric, however – and especially rhetoric – made extensive use of what were called ‘commonplaces’ – loci communes, topoi. The doctrine of the ‘places’ has an extensive role to play in all ancient, medieval and renaissance discourse. ‘Places’ were sources of arguments and forms of persuasion – pigeon-holes in the memory, as it were – which would provide material for an oration. They were storehouses of traditional and classical sayings, aphorisms, stylistic devices (‘figures’), images, which could be drawn on to support or embellish an argument for the purposes of persuasion, usually heavily moralistic in content and, where rhetoric was concerned, intended to add erudition, elegance and distinction to discourse. Books of these sayings, methodically arranged, abounded during the period of the Renaissance; used unimaginatively they became cliches, witnessing the intense reliance on past models, stylistic devices and moral comments which informed the renaissance mind; and ‘invention’ which, to the modern mind, implies the creation of something new, mainly implied the searching out and recall of suitable commonplaces for the subject in hand. ‘Invention…as the Renaissance man conceived it, was the key which opened the wisdom of the past that it might be applied to contemporary experience.’⁷ Prominent later humanists like Erasmus published collections of these Adagia for use and schoolboys spent long hours paraphrasing and committing suitable passages and extracts to memory, to be deployed on suitable occasions in ‘themes’ written by the children. (The ‘commonplaces’ could also refer to the headings or categories (e.g. genus, species, cause, etc.) ‘common’ to a number of subjects.)

It has been suggested by Professor Ong that

Since logic and rhetoric correspond to the basic polarity in life represented in other ways by contemplation … and action, or intellect and will, and since logic and rhetoric have come into being not in the hollows of men's minds but in the density of history, it is quite possible to analyse almost anything in Western culture (and perhaps in all cultures) in terms of its relationship to the logical and rhetorical poles.⁸

Clearly, then, the disputation concerning the relative merits of rhetoric and logic is of much more than academic interest – indeed it strikes at some of the deepest political, social and cultural movements of the age. This educational revision, then, reflects a considerable reorientation of the human spirit; and after some initial exposition of the humanists’ educational theories it will be necessary to relate them to much broader social and cultural movements.

But some preliminary words of warning are necessary. Though the humanists with their ‘new learning’ become the focus of attention, it must be remembered that the scholastics continued to exercise their logical skills, especially in the universities, until well into the seventeenth century.⁹Furthermore, as already hinted (and the matter must now be emphasised), the relationship between rhetorician and scholastic was not always as antagonistic as the formulaic polarisation of their approaches would seem to suggest. Often, of course, like Bruni, the humanists expressed only contempt for their ‘logic-chopping’ rivals. But Coluccio Salutati, a very prominent early humanist, on occasions adopted scholastic procedures of argument and composition and maintained friendly relationships with individual scholastics. After all, both were concerned with argument in some form; it would be surprising if there was not at times a degree of interaction; and this inter-action grew in the later renaissance period, especially after the Ramists, in the later sixteenth century, detached ‘invention’ from rhetoric and considered it a part of logic, leaving only elocution and pronunciation as specifically characterising ‘rhetoric’. Again, the first great humanist creative writer, Petrarch, sometimes wrote (in the medieval manner) as if truth was to be found only in the recesses of intellect, and not in public utterance, for he pointed out that the crowd ‘is not able to see anything with the mind: it judges all things according to the testimony of its eyes. It is the task of a higher spirit to recall his mind from his senses, and to remove his thoughts from the common practice.’ This is to encourage the contemplative outlook of the middle ages rather than the more active social spirit of the humanist: ‘Truly then, unless we care more about what we seem than about what we are, the applause of the foolish crowd will not please us so much as truth in silence’ (my italics).¹⁰ Finally, in the later neo-Platonic phase of the Renaissance (in the latter part of the fifteenth century) there was a certain reversion to more contemplative ideas, partly because the Medicis now held political power in a state (Fl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One The Humanists: ‘Words'
• Part Two The Empirics: ‘Things'
• Conclusion
• Short Biographies of the Main Theorists
• Select Bibliography
• Index