When Logos meets Bricolage: Reflections on the Beginnings of Modern Schooling1

David HamiltonDepartment of education,

Umeå University2

David.hamilton@pedag.umu.se

ABSTRACT/PREAMBLE An everyday French word, bricolage, is difficult to translate into English. It denotes a particular way in which men and women solve practical problems. They rummage – in the garden, kitchen, garage or workshop - for anything that is at hand, utilising existing artefacts creatively to overcome their initial problem. The same idea was fostered in the social sciences by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. He argued that participants in a culture follow an equivalent annexation process, rummaging for words, ideas and images that, somehow, overcome gaps in their conceptual apparatus – their logos. This paper is an exercise in bricolage. It attempts to fill gaps in an argument about the beginnings of modernist schooling. Central to the argument is that education underwent an ‘instructional turn’ during the sixteenth century. While etymological and other evidence for this turn is strong, the argument remains haunted what came before modern schooling? What regimes of teaching and learning, for example, can be discerned in the historical record before 1500? And, above all, how did pre-modern schooling take on the instructional regime - or frontal teaching - of modernist schooling?

Over four decades I have pursued an interest in the beginnings of modern schooling. I launched my inquiries with the dispositions I had already acquired as a schoolteacher, university teacher and parent; and, throughout, I have tried to report my inquiries in forms that are accessible to other teachers and parents.

My historical imagination was originally aroused as I studied an open plan school. To understand the meaning - contemporary and historical – of the open plan idea, I also needed to grapple with its alter ego - the classroom school. As I delved deeper, I became aware that

1 Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, April 7-11th, 2006.2 Mail address: 9 Ferry Orchard, Stirling FK9 5ND, Scotland, United Kingdom.

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words like class and curriculum, had entered the European educational lexicon for the first time in the 16th century (see, for instance, Hamilton, 1989).

My searches threw up other significant terms. These included syllabus, catechism, didactics, method, delivery – all of which seemed to acquire pedagogical prominence during that epoch. Some of these words, like class and catechism, were adapted from classical Latin and Greek usage whilst others, like didactics, were neologisms, appearing for the first time in Latin, Greek and vernacular vocabularies developed for those new times. In the end, I felt that this clustering of educational terms had a wider significance. It operated as a collection of signposts, surrogates and signifiers. Terms became signposts if they pointed out directions for further inquiry; they stood as surrogates when their emergence corresponded to the transition from medieval to modern forms of life; and they were signifiers, collectively, because their emergence marked the beginnings of modern schooling.

As a shorthand, I began to describe the beginnings of modern schooling as the ‘instructional turn’. I was comfortable with this characterisation because it drew attention to three phenomena. First, that schooling is not the same as education; secondly, that schooling and instruction are mutually constitutive; and thirdly, that the label ‘turn’ denotes a slow revolution. Over a prolonged period, that is, schools were invented or re-constituted as sites of instruction rather than as places of learning or education. And, by such means, schooling became a technology of modernism.

So far, so good. I had come a long way from looking up ‘classroom’ in the miniaturised version of the Oxford English Dictionary that I had purchased, with a magnifying glass, when it was advertised as a book club’s loss-leader. My claims about the instructional turn had become plausible; but were they science? Would they withstand closer scrutiny? Could they survive, individually and collectively?

Through the decades, this problem has fuelled a measure of scientific hesitation on my part. Although I have been aware of international scandals surrounding unprofessional conduct (or cheating) in science, my main source of hesitation has been a growing awareness of the power of writing. As a scientist - I use this term in the mainland European sense - I feel an ethical responsibility to make my findings public. Accordingly, my reporting of the instructional turn has been driven by conference and publication deadlines. In such cases, the production of a tidy argument has been paramount. In practice, however, I sometimes face a blank sheet of paper with little more than a feeling (e.g. that there is an historical connection dialectic and didactic); I sketch out a provocative interpretation, using items of evidence; I offer it at a seminar; and someone asks me to prepare a more polished version for publication (viz. Hamilton, 2002).

From then on, I am driven by closure considerations; that is, to render my initial feelings in a defensible form. At this point in the production process, I force myself into the position of becoming an outsider to my original text. Working more as an editor than an author, I identify loopholes and weak links in the argument; and I seek ways of sealing or recasting them so that the entire argument might withstand attack from outside.

This process is usually rewarding; but it is still vulnerable. Have I merely resorted to repeated use of supplementary claims and caveats, an endless round of wriggling and verbal gymnastics? Each time, I face the same quandary. Should I abandon elaborating the instructional turn and, in the process, retreat to my original antiquarian stance? Or should I run with my more elaborate claims, ensuring their survival with the fire-power of the all-covering, yet all-concealing, rhetoric available in the cockpits of academic life?

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Or is there a third way? I believe there is: it celebrates the cod-science credo ‘If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly’. The work described above has merely scratched the surface. I am not a trained historian; I do not have an optimal command of the classical languages (Greek, Latin, Hebrew); and I doubt whether I will live for ever. My investigation of the beginnings of modern schooling is, therefore, unfinished – like all scientific investigations. Nevertheless, the motivation to continue has survived, constantly stimulated by the example of others like Walter Ong (1968), Gabriel Codina Mir (1968), Robert McCLintock (1971), Lisa Jardine (1974),Olga Weijers (1995), and Yngve Nordkvelle (2004).

Inspired by their tenacity, I have periodically been able to achieve some equilibrium, catch my breath and organise my ideas into a form that can be circulated to others. Over the years, these reflections have appeared in books, journals and conference papers with titles like Notes from nowhere (on the beginning on modern schooling) (2001); From Dialectic to Didactic (2002); Instruction in the making: Peter Ramus and the beginnings of modern schooling (2003); and When does a 'house of studies' become a 'school'?: a comment on the Jesuits and the beginnings of modern schooling (2003a).

Collectively, however, they comprise not so much a florilegium - a well arranged bunch of flowers, but a folio - a collection of loose leaves. They represent diverse lines of inquiry, albeit within the framework of the instructional turn. Each paper was written to give voice to a feeling; and every foraged and fumbled answer helped in the formulation of consequent questions. Such reading and reasoning provoked and motivated my work. But it also reminded me of gaps in my knowledge and deficiencies in my interpretations. This awareness was a source of my hesitation; but it was also a motivation. My reading took many directions, spurred on by Lev Vygotsky’s ideas about zones of potential development and Louis Pasteur’s cognate assumption that chance favours the prepared. My ultimate goal was a better understanding of the instructional turn; but closure was often delayed until the next source could be consulted.

When, for instance, I moved to the north of Sweden at the end of the 1990s, I knew (thanks to Ingrid Nilsson) that Umeå University library had a copy of Milada Blekastad’s biography of Jan Amos Comenius (1969), a work that was relatively inaccessible from my previous position at the University of Liverpool. By that time, too, I was aware of Howard Hotson’s interests in the same period, having come across his article in Greengrass, Leslie & Raylor (1994). After an email exchange, I awaited the appearance of his Johann Heinrich Alsted 1588-1638 Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform (2000) and, at the time of writing, another volume dealing with Comenius. In a similar way, I became aware of a secularisation of Jesuit studies, through reading Anthony Grafton’s (1994) review of John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits (1993). This nourished a comparative line of inquiry (Protestant/Catholic) which, subsequently, has benefited not only from Jesuit scholarship (e.g. O’Malley’s work), but also from secular, or outsider views of the Society of Jesus offered, for instance, by Feingold (2003) and Höpfl (2004).

As I approached retirement in 2005, colleagues encouraged me to gather my unstitched folio into a single volume. Again, I hesitated. The material was accessible, if scattered; and, since it was already in the public domain, I had no moral reason to re-publish it. Nor, by that time, did I need additional publications to nourish my career. Nevertheless, the temptation to trim the folio into a florilegium did not disappear. But a stitch-up or make-over was not the solution. I had already been put off by two overlapping publishing phenomena that had become prevalent in the United Kingdom: ‘salami publication’ and the ‘auto-festschrift’ or ‘auto-obituary’. The former is where authors re-slice old ideas and dress them up as new publications; and the latter is where authors write introductions to their self-selected ‘greatest hits’. Above all, I recalled Norman Mailer’s ‘what I had was gold, if I had enough sense not to

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gild it’ (quoted in Menard, 1998). To re-work my original efforts would, I felt, be unscientific. It would be to remove the enchantment from science; that is, it would homogenise, if not sterilise, the social and human aspects of the research process.

My preference gradually became clear: leaving - or preserving - the unfinished elements of my earlier papers while, at the same time, revisiting the intellectual journey that had brought them into being. To do this, I was inspired by the model used by Stanley Fish in Is there a text in this Class? (1980). That is, I have chosen to embed the folio within a general introduction followed by short comments at the head of each article. Such a format is, I feel, appropriate to the logos of twenty-first century scholarship.

Logos is a classical Greek word that embraces word, reason and logic. It stands for the construction and defence of arguments or claims. To construct an argument, appropriate terms are identified (word); they are assembled as propositions (reason); and, finally, propositions are linked into longer chains of reasoning (logic). In turn, these arguments – oral or written - become the object of public scrutiny. By the end of the Middle Ages, this scrutiny had become centralised into institutions of learning which eventually became known as universities. It is no accident, therefore, that university life began to revolve around disputations and examinations where candidates are expected to demonstrate competence in the words, reasoning and logic (i.e. the logos) of their chosen field of inquiry.

The scrutiny of earlier modernist arguments encountered two problems at the beginning of the twentieth century. First came the realisation – symbolised by Einstein’s work on relativity – that what you see depends on where you stand; and secondly came the recognition that the words used in the construction of an argument are not elementary particles (i.e. atoms). Meaning is not intrinsic to the word itself but, instead, is modulated by its context of use. ‘Fire’ in the military may not mean the same as ‘fire’ in the theatre.

If an accepted purpose of formal education is to give each generation access to prevailing forms of logos, there is pedagogical and democratic merit in allowing interested readers to judge not only the folio papers but also the mode of their production. They are not, in a modernist sense, final truths - the culmination of a long chain of linear – or Cartesian - reasoning. Instead, they are essays that, on the one hand, attempt to make pedagogical and historical sense of different educational phenomena and that, on the other hand, display the many choices taken in their production. They are merely an interpretation of the data; neither a definitive nor an exhaustive account. They have been produced both within and from the logos that prevailed in the latter half of the 20th century. Their preparation required endless attempts to reconcile data and interpretation, to overcome false starts and dead ends; and to finesse ambiguities that surface in translation. The folio, therefore, can only be judged with the help of such process data.

There has been, however, an additional reason for leaving the folio papers as originally written and made public. It relates to the parallel work of doctoral candidates working under the supervision of myself and other colleagues. Most doctoral candidates, and their supervisors, encounter productivity pressures. Even Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Jesuits) reputedly suffered delay, for pecuniary reasons, in his studies at the University of Paris in the 1530s. Such pressures have survived and have probably increased since the 1980s, as productivity-focused management has penetrated higher education in Europe. To meet this challenge, candidates and supervisors have sought to absorb this external pressure in their working practices. One option has been to encourage candidates to present their doctoral theses as a folio of working papers held together by a carefully-prepared introduction, rather than as a monograph arising from the prolonged reworking of seminar papers and research reports (see Hamilton, 2003b for the Swedish argument). If such a strategy is appropriate to

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the intellectual development of doctoral candidates, it is equally appropriate for others, like me, who also struggle with the logos that emerged in the wake of Einstein’s hypotheses about the world and its workings.

The world I seek to write about – the beginnings of modern schooling - had little to do with Einstein. I had, therefore, to learn to see it in a different light. I could study words like class and curriculum using etymology. But what was the collective meaning of their invention or renewal? To answer this question, I needed to see them against the background of the Renaissance and Reformation or, what amounts to the same thing, the initiation of modernism.

In this context, modernism is not merely a label that western historians use to characterise the successor to medievalism. The word modernism also signifies a period in western history when the human species began to take over its own destiny. Previously, the fate of human beings was deemed to be in the hands of two agents, God and Lady Luck (Fortuna), with human agency (i.e. humanism) excluded from the argument. One memorable humanist initiative was Christopher Columbus’ 1492 voyage into the unknown; and subsequent high points in the consolidation of modernism include Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) and René Descartes Discourse on Method (1637). Columbus went against conventional wisdom; Bacon pointed out the consequence of Columbus’ efforts – the ‘relief of mankind’s estate’; and Descartes claimed that such relief could be established with new truths gleaned, logically, from existing knowledge.

Modernism, therefore, was launched by the humanist and scientific revolutions. It was based on the idea that knowledge, reorganised as science, could save mankind from the fates suffered by earlier generations. Indeed, educational thought and practice played an important role in this salvation narrative. Something had taken place between Columbus’ voyage and Descartes Method that, I felt, was worthy of sustained investigation.

Accepting the existence of modernism, however, raised another historical question: whatever happened to it? Will it, or has it, come to an end? If so, when and why? These issues about late-modernism and/or post-modernism have been widely debated since the 1980s (see, for instance, Doll, 1993). As noted, I tacitly link the end of modernism to rise of relativism in the first two decades of the twentieth century (i.e. the epoch of Einstein’s publications on relativity). My own view is that it would be defensible to write a speculative history of the twentieth century under the rubric ‘The coming end of western schooling’. Such change, perhaps, may also constitute a slow revolution but, for lack of time, I leave the elaboration of such an argument to others.

Returning, therefore, to the events of the sixteenth century: what do I mean when I characterise a ‘turn’ as a slow revolution? I revisit the idea, held since I studied for my PhD in the early 1970s, that history is more about change than the past. Yet, to write a history of schooling is not merely to identify change but also to identify change that, paraphrasing Bateson (1973, p. 286), made a difference.

The remainder of this paper, then, not only offers some background to the instructional turn, it is equally an examination of boundaries between institutions and concepts (e.g. when is a schola not a school? and what are the differences between learning and instruction). Overall, the discussion focuses on schooling in the 1500s, and how this phenomenon might be distinguished - conceptually and empirically - from earlier, later and, ultimately, future ‘teaching and learning regimes’ (Trowler, 2004, p. 199).

Schola and School

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Discussing the history of schooling is difficult. It is bedevilled by the fact that word schola was known and used in classical Roman times, and that the word academy was used in classical Athens. So how is it possible to discern something new in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? Or is it the case that schools are as old as recorded civilisation?

One option is to look at educational institutions that existed before the sixteenth century. In this respect, I have found two sources helpful: C. Stephen Jaeger’s The Envy of Angels: Cathedral schools and social ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200 (1994); and Anthony Grafton’s discussion of On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Letters, written by Leon Battista Alberti and variously dated to 1428 and the early 1430s (Grafton, 2000).

Jaeger focused on cathedral schools in the 11th century because, he suggests, they occupied what, until he looked at them more closely, was a ‘blank space’ in the historical record. None of them is remembered for ‘great works of philosophy or imaginative fiction’. They produced ‘very little poetry worth reading’, they are not sources of ‘autobiography or personal reminiscences’, and ‘no compendia of learning’ exist comparable to those subsequently produced in the twelfth century (p. 1). Paradoxically, however, these cathedral schools were subjected to ‘enthusiastic praise by contemporary observers’ (p. 2). Jaeger seeks to resolve this paradox by assuming that ‘something was going on at the early cathedral schools that is not transmitted by the sources or set in intelligible structures by current [i.e. late-20th century] frames of explanation’ (p. 2).

The key observation, Jaeger realised was the absence of surviving texts from cathedral schools. Instead, their renown derived from the ‘personal authority of the teacher’ which, in turn, was the ‘dominant criterion of pedagogy’ (p. 80). Thus, cathedral school differed from later schools in a specific way:

The framework of instruction known to us [in the 20th century] – reading, commenting, memorizing, lecturing, interpreting - existed and was…a minor element of a more embracing mode: imitation of the teacher….the physical presence of the teacher demonstrating the subject through his own example is the essence of instruction…he is the curriculum (p. 76, for evidence of early grammar instruction see Bagley, 2000)

Moreover, Jaeger generalised from his data. He maintained that imitation of the teacher was ‘probably the most ancient form of pedagogy’, working its effect through the ‘diffusion of personal charisma’ (p. 76). Such ‘teaching by example’ (p. 79) was, he suggests, the basis of European cathedral schooling in the 11th century. ‘Charismatic teachers’ taught the ‘curriculum of their mere presence’, transforming ‘loving students into little copies of themselves’ (p. 192).

A cathedral school, therefore, was not a centre of literary, book-based learning. Rather, ways of living were communicated without the mediation of texts. Young people learned manners and morals under the charismatic influence of a notable ‘father’ of the church, one of whose adult acolytes might function as a master of novices (magister novitiorum). Under such influence and surveillance, novices were disciplined – bodily and mentally – until they acquired sufficient cultural capital for preferment in ecclesiastical circles, worldly as well as spiritual.

It is difficult to convey how such schools operated. Jaeger is aware of this problem. In identifying them as ‘a place of discipline’, he turns to related sources. One of these is a

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‘palace school under Charlemagne’ whose ecclesiasticae disciplinae is described, in the following way, by Hincmar of Rheims (806-882):

The king’s court is properly called a school, that is a course of discipline [schola, id est disciplina], not because it consists solely of schoolmen, men bred on learning and well trained in the conventional way, but rather a school in its own right, which we can take to be a place of discipline, that is correction since it corrects men’s way of dressing [or behaving: habitus] and walking, their speech and actions, and in general holds them to the norms of restraint appropriate to a good life. (p. 27-28, square brackets in original)

Jaegar also accepts that the idea of ‘palace’ or ‘court’ schools is open to misunderstanding – because it differs from twentieth century conceptions of schools as institutions where ‘some people teach and lecture and others learn and read’ (p. 28). He suggests that to recover the earlier notion, the ‘suggestion of a learned institution’ should be removed from the word ‘school’ (p. 28). ‘What remains’, he continues:

Is the sense of membership in a group with common characteristics, habits and interests. In Merovingian times [6-8th Century France] schola commonly refers to the court entourage.

Jaeger also identifies other contributory sources, in German and French, which also note the problems of applying the word ‘school’ to the personal, charismatic nature of instructional institutions in Carolingian times. The French source he cites suggests that in the 8th and 9th centuries: ‘there are no monastic schools, properly speaking; nor are there schools in the monasteries…the school was the monastery in its entirety’ (note 37, p. 383, my translation).

By the 12th century, however, the charismatic basis of learning in cathedral, monastic and courtly ‘schools’ had begun to change. One of the key figures in this transformation was Peter Abelard (1079- 1142) who, in a poem written for his son Astralabe, commented on teaching and learning with the admonition: ‘care not who speaks but what the value of his words are’ (Jaeger, 1996, p. 230); The ‘old’ learning, characterised by Jaeger as ‘manners without letters’ (p. 228), became the ‘new learning’ through becoming ‘textualized’ in the form of ‘fiction, sculpture, and didactic and imaginative literature’ (p.14, see also Bagley, 2000). Such textualisation entailed packaging old learning into forms that could be disengaged from their association with charismatic teachers. In turn, this repackaging fostered the creation of a range of independent teachers, operating outside the immediate jurisdiction of the Church.

The existence of independent or private schools is famously illustrated in a painting by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c.1290 – c.1348), Allegory of Good Government: Effects of  Good Government in the City (1338-40). The allegory takes the form of a fresco prepared for a public setting in Siena, Italy. Part of the fresco portrays the ideals of good government. According to one source (the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910, reproduced at www.newadvent.org ) the fresco comprises a ‘great collection of little pictures of manners, which analyse in a thousand ways the condition of a happy society’. One of the scenes is a representation of a teacher. It appears that the teacher has something to sell and, to this end, has set up shop in the market place, between a shoemaker and a butcher. Whether this is a typical independent school of the Middle Ages is, of course, an open question. Nevertheless, the marketplace setting suggests that, like their fellow traders, private teachers might combine themselves into a guild and, in certain cases (e.g. Paris and Bologna), constitute themselves as a corporate studium generale (the early name for a university) which achieved both international attention and Papal recognition.

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Lorenzetti’s fourteenth-century fresco provides a chronological bridge between Jaeger’s account of cathedral schools before the 12th century and Leon Battista Alberti’s writing of the fifteenth century. An early humanist, Alberti comments sourly on how the ‘pursuit of learning’ affected young people:

See how pale they are, how flaccid their bodies, and how weighed down they seem, as they emerge from their long confinement in the prison of their schools and libraries. (quoted in Grafton, 2000, p. 32)

Grafton comments that Italian communes came to support such ‘public schools’ through the maintenance or sponsoring of independent teachers. Influential and wealthy members of the community wanted their children to read Latin, master Latin Grammar, and compose Latin texts, since all relevant to a ‘sophisticated mercantile society and independent city governments’ (2000, p. 33). Yet, Alberti’s comments suggest that, for an early humanist like himself, textualisation and the corporatisation of learning had gone too far.

Learning and Instruction

Alberti’s observation, therefore, can be read as a humanist comment on how the ’new’ learning, engendered by 12th century textualisation, had turned into practices decried by humanists (viz. scholasticism). Equally, it can be argued that the textualisation which occurred around the 12th century was matched by further textualisation with the introduction of moveable-type printing in the middle of the fifteenth century. Medieval texts were subjected to wholesale re-evaluation and reconstruction (e.g. with regard to type, layout and (modern) languages) such that this re-textualisation also stands for another aspect of the instructional turn – the invention of text-books.

At the risk of over-simplification, then, printed text-books replaced the hand-books that arose from 12th century textualisation. One popular category of late-medieval handbook were a genre known as books of hours. These handbooks were manuals that could be carried in the hand (Latin: manus – hand), they served as personal and private texts, and they were popular among women (see, for instance, Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index3). According to an exhibition catalogue:

The medieval Book of Hours evolved out of the monastic cycle of prayer which divided the day into eight segments, or "hours": Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Compline, and Vespers. By the early fifteenth century, the format of the Book of Hours had developed to satisfy the demands of private, as opposed to communal, devotion. These portable books are smaller in format than their monastic forebears, designed for use by individuals. (University of Pennsylvania, 2005, for a complementary discussion of gender imagery in medieval education, see Bagley, 2000).

But how were these medieval handbooks used? One line of inquiry is opened up by following the word lectio. Originally , it referred to the monastic practice of ‘reading aimed at spiritual formation’ (Dilworth, 1995, p. 1). But how did such private reading become public reading (i.e. lecturing)? Peter Lombard’s Sentences (c1150) is illustrative of an early stage in this development in textualisation for reading and lecturing. It was a four-book compendium of theological knowledge which provided learners with access to earlier sources. It contrasts, therefore, with Thomas Aquinas’ Quaestiones de Anima (1289). The latter was an account, compiled after the event, of ‘questions’ that had been disputed under Aquinas’ governance (see Aquinas, 1984, pp. ii-iii). Both authorities – a

3 Available at http://www.haverford.edu/library/reference/mschaus/mfi/whatis.html

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word that is preferable to author - had assembled texts to promote reading and learning. But if Lombard’s work reflected late monastic practice, Aquinas’ textualisation was a university text. Its association with medieval disputations reflected literacy practices that were public and inter-personal rather than private and intra-personal. An historian of Western Philosophy has made a similar comment on these versions of textualisation:

The style of the quaestiones gradually made inroads on the lectiones, so that commentaries on the Sentences, for example, quickly became a suite of questions. The style of the Summa theologiae of Aquinas (but not of his Summa contra gentes) reflects that of public disputations, though this was from the outset a written work. (McInerny, 1965, vol. 2, chapter 1)

Thus, the history of lectio can be seen as a narrative of how inter-personal learning practices gained prominence over intra-personal learning practices. It is a story of how early texts mediated learning, while later texts could mediate instruction.

Another source on variations in literacy practice that surrounded lectio is the Latin word praelectio, which has the corresponding German and Swedish forms, Vorlesung and föreläsning. A praelectio, was a pre-reading, something that occurred prior to a public reading. Since medieval manuscripts were liable to transcription errors, the purpose of the pre-reading was to establish that all listeners were following the same text. According to the standard Latin Dictionary (Lewis & Short, 18794), this word provides circumstantial evidence for the separation of readers and listeners.

My exploration of the distinction between learning and instruction was originally inspired by Robert McClintock’s ‘Towards a place for study in a world of instruction’ (1971), a text I had encountered in the 1990s. In the immediate post-1960s, McClintock had argued for a 20th century revival of learning through greater attention to ‘study’. To this end, he highlighted the positive role of learning and study in the pre-modern period. Historical data, however, were subsidiary to his main argument; they were more a set of intriguing provocations than a well-warranted exposition. Moreover, McClintock’s historical argument seems to have remained an outlier in the history of ideas, escaping the attention of other educationists and historians.

Having been fired up by McClintock’s thesis, more than a decade passed before I could find a source which independently repeated and substantiated an equivalent claim about the historical differences between learning and instruction: John A. Olson's The Journey to Wisdom: Self-education in patristic and medieval literature (1995). Olson also bridges medieval and humanist practice. He argues that medieval education was built around 'humankind's capacity for self-direction' (p. x) and that, as a result, educational practice was generally structured around a 'journey' to spiritual wisdom. Learning, Olson suggests, was steered by a search for wisdom which, after Augustine, had become Christian wisdom. An illustrative representation of this journey is included in a compendium - the Margarita philosophica (pearl of wisdom) - prepared by a Carthusian monk, Gregor Reisch (1467-1525).

4 Available via http://www.perseus.tufts.edu

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This journeying to wisdom, however, had almost reached its zenith by the time of Reisch’s portrayal. By the middle of the sixteenth century, idealisations of the journey to wisdom had begun to fade. Olson cites the impact, variously, of alternative images offered by Niclas Copernicus (1473-1543), Galilei Galileo (1564-1642), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) and Isaac Newton (1642-1727). By Newton's time, wisdom had merely become knowledge of the matter and motion of atoms (see Olson, 1995, p. 199).The medieval past was being relinquished such that:

Newton’s Principia [1687], though written by a man who had religious interests, is not in itself a statement about the journey to wisdom. As scientists, Galileo and Kepler changed the tradition by emphasising the consistency of natural law and down-playing the element of special providence and miracle….The world remains a 'Thou' for them as an object of contemplation but, as an object of examination, has become an 'It'. (Olson, 1995, pp. 197-198)

Another source which traverses the same territory as Olson is Brian Stock’s After Augustine: The meditative reader and the text (2001). Stock suggests that an 'ancient contemplative practice' was turned into a 'new type of mental exercise' (p. 13). In their 'search for wisdom', medieval scholars (i.e. theologians) cultivated the 'interior life' following the practices charted, for instance, in Augustine's Confessions (397-398). Yet, at the same time, these scholars also 'left behind a large corpus of writings' (p. 14). In turn, these writings fostered a convergence between the spiritual exercise of meditation, and the literacy practices of reading. In late and medieval Latin, therefore, meditari (thinking, pondering, reflecting) was associated with legere (to read). Like Jaeger, Stock suggests that the Middle Ages can be divided into two epochs, pre-textual (meditation) and textual (lectio et meditari). Gradually,

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that is, reading became a necessary prelude to meditation. Here are quotations that illustrate this difference:

in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the term meditatio retained its links with the sense of the Hebrew root haga which means to murmur in a low voice or to recite at a barely audible level. (Stock, 2001, p. 15, final emphasis added)

To this extent, meditation was based on memorised texts. Yet, when later authors wrote of lectio et meditation or the lectio spiritualis, they referred to 'oral reading that was followed by silent meditation' (p. 15, emphasis added). Thus,

the text of the Bible, in which divine being was thought to reside, was silent until it was read, and silent again after the oral reading was finished and the meditation had begun. To proceed from lectio to meditatio was thus to ascend from the senses to the mind. (p. 16).

Stock seems to accept that such literacy practices, the translation of words into sounds and the associated creation of the ‘self-reflective’ and ‘self-transformative’ reader (Kuchar, 2004), were personal rather than public forms of reading. Based on handbooks, they constituted a 'literary genre for personal devotions' (Stock, 2001, p. 16).

Stock’s analysis is important, if only because, like Olson, he identifies literacy or learning practices that are different from modernist models of instruction. Two more phenomena allow the same interpretation. The first is the history of catechesis, as described in Ian Green’s The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c1530-1740 (1996). The word catechesis comes from a Greek verb (katachizo) which means, literally, ‘to make hear, hence to instruct’ (p. 14) by asking questions. By the late Middle Ages, a number of English derivatives emerged, including ‘cathecysme’ (the ‘form containing the catechetical material’, p. 14). Nevertheless, this form of instructing underwent a ‘striking’ change after the 1520s. ‘To make hear’ was transformed by combining formalized questioning with formalized answering into a new literacy practice – the modern catechism. In Germany and, later, elsewhere:

most protestants replaced the older pattern of a series of statements of belief by a system of questions and answers designed not only to test catechumen’s knowledge but also to keep their attention and enhance their comprehension. (p. 16, emphasis added)

Green also suggests, with caution, that this elaborated form of instruction was the ‘fusion of three related but distinct methods of instruction’; namely the ‘rote repetition of statements’, the ‘question and answer technique’ and the ‘use of dialogue’ (pp. 16-17). The last of these annexed another literacy practice: the ‘tricks’ that dramatists and thespians used, in the century of William Shakespeare’s birth (1564), to capture and hold an audience. The implication of Green’s suggestion is that the same practices were colonised, for the same end, by professional teachers (p. 19).

The second form of literacy practice that assists my argument in favour of the instructional turn, is associated with the Jesuit’s Spiritual Exercises, also developed after the 1520s (originally in Spanish and later in Latin). These, too, were a ‘manual’ to be followed by men (e.g. Jesuits in training) and women (nuns) as part of their journey towards God (Ganss, 1992, pp. 8 & 144). They were developed by the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola, on the basis of his own conversion to spiritual living. According to Ganss (founder of the Institute of Jesuit Sources, St Louis), the exercises were to be carried out by an exercitant, ‘ordinarily with counsel from a director’ (p. 3). From another perspective, Ganss notes, the Exercises were an aid in ’spiritual

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conversations’ (p. 3) which, at times, took the form of a ‘colloquy’, a conversation or dialogue (endnote 39; see also Demoustier, 1996).

To this extent, the Exercises was a hybrid text. It may have been self-study based on imitation where exercitants, through reading and reflection, modelled themselves on the life of Christ (which already existed in many textual versions). Yet, at the same time, the Spiritual Exercises can also be read as a syllabus with a pre-planned sequence of exercises through which learners are steered by a director. Further, the Exercises is not only noteworthy for the separation of reading from meditation, but also for the redefinition of meditation as the enactment of prescribed ‘exercises’. As Ganss notes, ‘some profit comes to anyone who reads it, but the far more substantial benefit accrues to the one who carries out the practices suggested’ (p.3).

When Logos meet Bricolage: a reprise

This paper has focused on what constituted a pre-modern school and on the difference between learning and instruction. My intention has been to tighten the slack in my own argument about the beginnings of modern schooling. In the process, I have drawn attention, generally, to the literacy practices of the Middle Ages. My proposal is that the beginnings of modern schooling owes much to two phenomena: the process of textualisation and the dis-association of reading from meditation.

The first of these, the process of textualisation, became accentuated (according to Jaeger) after 1200. Education increasingly became text-based and relocated in the workshops of private teachers. Some of these teachers merely took existing texts and read them to their auditors; whilst others amended earlier texts, creating new handbooks that circulated from learner to learner.

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The second phenomenon which underpinned the emergence of modern(ist) schooling was the gradual dissolution of late-medieval monastic reading and, in the process, the dis-association of reading from meditation. The control and management of texts gradually fell out of the hands of learners and into the hands of teachers. As suggested, these teachers then ‘read’ the text, leaving their auditors to listen and/or meditate (but see the 14th century German classroom5). Finally, under the influence of earlier literary dialogues and their realization through forms of stagecraft, the questioning of the teacher and the silent meditation of the learner were reconstituted as a two-voiced colloquy of initiation and response that served as a long-lasting yet flexible paradigm for modernist educational instruction.

As noted at the outset, however, the preparation of this paper has been motivated by the logos of current scholarship – the need to combine words, propositions and logic into a defensible argument. Yet, to achieve this end, I have intensively engaged in bricolage – searching for near-at-hand evidence and just-in-time ideas to buttress my initial argument. Equally, I have no doubt that dedicated medieval historians will regard my literary practices – my bricolage in search of logos - as hardly more than intellectual chutzpah.

I defer to their judgement but, at the same time, I justify what I have done with the aphorism attributed variously to Seneca, Horace and Hippocrates: ars longa vita brevis which, in Chaucer’s 14th century translation, is rendered as ‘That lyf so short, that craft so long to lerne’ (The Assembly of Fowles).

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