FEW children, in the developed world, spend their summer holidays bringing in the harvest. Yet the timing of the summer break dates from the days when child labour was too valuable to lose in the vital final weeks of the growing season. The roots of modern education, in Britain and elsewhere, lie in the half-hidden world of ancient schools.
Nicholas Orme’s previous book, a definitive history of English medieval childhood, disproved the notion that previous generations treated children as miniature adults. This one explodes some pervasive myths about their education. First, there was quite a lot of teaching available: it was not just confined to the rich and priestly. There were hundreds of schools in England, some in monasteries and cathedrals, others founded with individual charitable endowments, often with a large bunch of private pupils paying modest fees.
Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England by Nicholas Orme.
Nor was education just for boys, though just how and where girls were taught is hard to trace. The boundaries between childhood and adulthood were blurred: at Winchester, the first and most generously endowed independent school, relatives of the founder could stay until they were 25.
Education was not just for the pious. Although biblical texts were central, there were plenty of other subjects, including maths and secular literature. Business studies—a mixture of law, accountancy and practical French—were taught at Oxford as early as the 13th century, arousing the same sniffy response from some of the dons as they do today.
Then, as now, the decline of educational standards was hotly debated. In 1509, Edmund Dudley, a counsellor to Henry VII, wrote sorrowfully, “Look well upon your two universities, how famous they have been and in what condition they be now. Where be your famous men…the good and substantial scholars of grammar?” The notion that education peaked around the time of the complainer’s own graduation, and has gone down ever since, is an ancient one.
So too are some government policies. The determination to destroy good schools in the name of uniformity dates from the dissolution of the monasteries. And the state’s desire to ensure that young minds are spared the danger of independent thought pops up a few years later, with the licensing of teachers and the setting of government-approved textbooks.
One weakness is the book’s scope. Describing a time when national identity mattered less than it does now, some mention of schools elsewhere in Christendom would have been welcome. But provincialism in educational research is, alas, nothing new.