Essay: Changes in methods of teaching and ideas on the best way to instruct students

Methods of teaching and ideas on the best way to instruct students are forever changing. However, to gain a wider understanding of the changes, it is potentiate to look into what causes these changes. Although there are numerous studies stating what the preeminent way to teach is, there has been several ideas that have been used for many years. The Renaissance was a period in history in which advancements in education, politics, and philosophy were influenced heavily by classical ideas and there was a conscious move away from the influence of the church. The theories and writings produced during the Renaissance were extremely influential throughout all of Europe. During this period of rebirth, one of the main focuses was on Humanist thought and classical learning. Amongst the things that the Renaissance gave birth to, arguable one of the most impactful and is the humanist education which began to crystallize in the early fourteenth century. Humanism was a movement where the focus was on the main individual human rather than religious doctrine, emphasizing the good within human beings and focus on everyday human problems and situations. The focus on education was still structured within a curriculum, but now included a focus on the human as an individual. According to Paul Oskar, the twentieth century’s foremost scholar of the movement, the intellectual pursuits the humanist most valued consisted of these: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy. These became the subjects of humanist education: roughly the equivalent of our modern humanities.
Throughout history, education is particularly susceptible to influence from wider intellectual, philosophical and political movements; scholars have been tempted to justify their own intellectual formation by applauding or condemning the educational attitudes and assumptions of previous epochs. It is necessary to begin by saying that so much has been written about medieval and Renaissance education, that it is possible that it has been affected by contemporary agendas. However, historical fashions have often had beneficial results leading to a depth in understanding.
Over recent years educating children began to be a very popular subject, with many writers such as Roger Ascham, Michael de Montaigne and Thomas Wilson studied and determined the best methods when it came to educational strategies. One key historian, was Garin, whose work consisted of reinterpreting published texts and secondary material. Yet his most major contribution was his developments and broad ranging view of Renaissance education, particularly of the impact of humanism on schools and teaching. Garin’s like many other scholars, interpretation was based on a sharply drawn contrast between the middle ages and the Renaissance. He paints the same gloomy picture of the late medieval scholastic methods, aims and curriculum, arguing that ‘barbarous discipline was the norm in late medieval Italian schools.’ From such a curriculum, boys were taught contempt for the secular world; indeed, all medieval education- even its most classicizing- was directed according to Garin, to religious, theological and spiritual goals. When secular learnings was cultivated in the later middle ages, it was for the technical, professional training, to allow each individual to fit into his appropriate level of the social hierarchy. This wasn’t a new concept; the platonic education is a key example of this. For instance, the Platonic education of Schools, is a type of curriculum suitable for the different ages and is an example of ‘learning society’.
The emergence of humanistic education as the essential first step towards social advancement is demonstrated within the scramble to create local grammar schools in the twenty first century which allowed to schools push their own curriculum in order to perpel the most privileged of children forward in society. This wasn’t a new concept as before the end of the sixteenth century, education in humanistic studies had established itself as the most widely accepted qualification for entry into privileged classes of Europe. It is said that humanist education produced social advancements and gave a tangible opportunity to make ambious and intelligent pupils free humanist education widely available. It is important to note that the Renaissance society by design was elitist. Therefore it can be said that the humanist education by design was used in order “to act as a barrier to keep virtually all the lower classes out of the privilege classes.” Furthermore, these qualification’s based on ability and education were more beneficial to the welfare of society than that of the qualifications of the accident of birth into a aristocratic society. Therefore, humanist education no doubt undervalued originality and overvalued intellectual and social conformity, but it did impart skills that enabled graduates to perform the duties in which they were employed, especially skills in writing and speaking. As a result, this demonstrates that the change between the late medieval curriculum and the Renaissance was due to the need to prepare people for work; therefore has there been a split between inspiring indiviuals through education but rather to use education in order to create an individual prepared for the outside world.
For Garin, Renaissance Humanism represented a revolutionary change in European history, and this dramatic new force was particularly powerful and effective in the classroom. Most importantly were the new aims for education:
The school created in fifteenth-century Italy was […] an educator of man, capable of shaping a child’s moral character so as not to be preconditioned but free, open in future to every possible specialization but before all else humane and whole, with social links to all mankind and endowed with the prerequisites for the mastery of all techniques but in full self-control […] and not liable to run the risk of becoming a tool itself.
In this new process of the liberal education of the whole man, Garin emphasized the role of classics- ‘the discovery of the antique accomplished by the humanist, their discovery of man as an individual entity, historically concrete and determinable’. This study of ancient’s represented the
Acquisition of historical consciousness and critical consciousness, of awareness of self-others, of an understanding of the fullness of the human world and its development […] The revived study of the ancients, rediscovered as such, came to signify the discovery of a sense of human colloquium and collaboration, the initiation to the world of men. Educating youth in the classics truly thus helped to provide the beginning of an awareness of the human community in its development and its unity.
Garins view that objective self-knowledge is developed only through knowledge of others; to know himself, and individual must be able to take someone else’s perspective. This is what Garin believed humanist educator accomplished with their revival of antiquity. Through their philological, critical, historical understanding of ancients, they enabled their own pupils to know the great exemplary figures of antiquity and hence know themselves. Accordingly, this could not have happened in the Middle Ages because antiquity was not then studied historically but studied subjectively and uncritically, and so medieval classical studies- in so far as they existed – could not lead to the development of the whole man. Nevertheless, by sustaining the view that the coming of humanism at the turn of the fifteenth century signalled, whether for better or worse, an educational revolution, these approaches tend to obscure significant elements of continuity before and after 1400.
To Nigel Tubbs, the character of liberal arts education is reconfigured in the tenth to the twelfth centuries across Europe by the growth of monastic, urban, parish and cathedral schools. Nevertheless, as the new translations of Aristotle’s work become available this logic becomes the organon, the instrument, of judging truth from falsehood. This logic becomes grounded in the old Aristotelian logic of necessity of harmony, positing truth as non-contradiction.
Kimball points to considerable ambivalence in the twelfth century regarding the meaning of philosophy, and the artes liberals. The term modern gradually becomes used to describe those who embrace the new Aristolian logic, but with this there becomes a certain suspicion that they were throwing aside education in the classical or rhetorical tradition, and ultimately casting the authores adrift. As such, ‘liberal education and its rationale were being transformed.’ The issue here is the definition of a liberal arts education which is important as it defines the relationship to theology. Therefore, the question here is whether liberal arts prioritised reason over revelation, or revelation over reason, became less important than the reaction against its neglect of the classical authors, a reaction against intellectualism per se, and a demand for a return to the rhetorical and ethical tradition.
The influx new translations of classical philosophers in the renaissance period creates a new front for the dualism of philosophy and the ideal of humanity carried in the rhetorical or artes liberales tradition. Kristeller, suggests that the liberal arts and the philosophical and scientific disciplines complete with the authores of the great Latin texts. Therefore, classical learning is reformed into the humanist revival of Latin and Greek texts which stands opposed to the dominance of Aristotelian philosophy in the universities. Because of this, Kristeller argues that Renaissance humanism ‘must be understood as a characteristic of the phrase in what may be called the rhetorical tradition in Western Culture.’ To the humanist of this period Cicero is seen as something of a synthesis between wisdom and rhetoric to the extent that it could be argued that Renaissance humanism was an age of Ciceronianism.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_rYaBgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=nigel+tubbs+Philosophy+Higher+Education&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjukqz1rsDeAhXKJsAKHX7RAF0Q6AEINjAC#v=onepage&q=nigel%20tubbs%20Philosophy%20Higher%20Education&f=false
LINK TO NIGEL TUBBS and the idea of would we study a university course on how to be human? This is what was aimed at during the Renaissance period.
The preoccupation of scholarship alongside the educational changes brought in the wake of the fifteenth-century Renaissance has tended to put into the shade the possible effects on pre-university education of other major intellectual upheavals. It is well known that the rise of the universities and of scholastic after the turn of the thirteenth century constituted one of the major turning points in the history of western learning. The rise of scholasticism brought new authors into vogue; not just Aristotle and the Arabs but also new grammatical texts such as Magnae derivations, Doctrinale, Graecismus and Catholicon; with the works of Vergil suffering a corresponding loss of popularity. Moreover, the end of the thirteenth century saw the rise of pre-humanism, with the introduction of new texts; therefore it must be asked to what extent such works began to enter the curriculum during the fourteenth century, well before the advent of the humanist educators. Overall, it will has become clear that the curriculum change at the pre-university level was a complex development from the thirteenth to the fourteenth centuries in Italy: spotlighting Renaissance humanism as the only or even the paramount influence in the history of education over these three centuries is to oversimplify a complex and many-sided historical process.
By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the programme of humanistic studies and the dream of a renewal of the ‘civilised learning and literature as a means to the end of barbarism’ had established itself amongst the most of the major countries of western and central Europe . A genuine interest in new learning allowed room to modify the curriculum, leading in mainly arts degrees, in order to give greater attention to humanistic studies. In doing this, it gave a great foundation in which students were able to master classical Latin and ancient literature. However, in the first decade of the new century, new humanist were becoming more outspoken and openly voicing their opinion on how change the liberal arts curriculum, seeking to give much greater attention to classical grammar, rhetoric, moral philosophy, and the reading of the ancient authors. This development brought about open conflict into academic life, as traditional functioning universities and senior faculty resisted the pressure for change. What is interesting is that we continue to experience these conflicts within a modern educational institution, with many administrators unable to agree on curriculum change. As highlighted by Proffesor Tubbs, ‘what is seen as most challenging for educators about the modern logic of education is that it can become its own content not only within parts of an educational programme but as the whole programme, its structure, rationale, pedagogy and assessment’. This is the new challenge modern liberal arts education has to achieve, in maintaining these vocations to work with these first principal but also to make the modern difficulty of doing so the subjectively and the substance of whole programmes.
The humanist penetration of schools inevitably also led to a more shallow but unmistakable diffusion of the new Latin culture that was arising into the vernacular world , and poetry and courtly literature saw a rise in popularity. “The conviction that humanistic education was an essential preparation for high public offices not only persisted but grew, and humanism established an educational hegemony that was not broken until nearly the end of the nineteenth century.” Clearly, the Renaissance Humanism was alive and influential.
Paragraph 2: Modern Education
So what does a Classical education mean today? ‘We find that, in an uninstructed age, the old regime needs not only defining but also defining.’ When thinking about a classical education, you first think of Greek and Latin, however, over time a classical education began to delved in the history, philosophy, literature, and the art of the Greek and Roman worlds, affording over time to the more perspicacious devotees a remarkably high degree of cultural understanding, an understanding that endured and ‘marked the leaner of life’. A classical education did not set itself to instilling knowledge alone; it also sought to polish and refine the individual. Therefore why do we continue to study it now in the twenty-first century, while we have nothing in common with the ‘heroes’ that we were once admired and replicated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Today, it can be said that we apply “classical” or “classical” to anything we believe to be excellent and universal as a classical education ideally led not to knowledge alone, but to the cultivation of the mind and spirit.
One key historian that goes into greater depth on the ideas of a classical education is Robert Proctor. In the second edition of Defining the Humanities: How Rediscovering a Tradition Can Improve Our School, Proctor traces two linked developments in education and in the western perception of the self: one is the evolving definition of the humanities, and the other is the change in the relation of the individual to his or her studies, the state and the community. Proctors thesis is brief, that one of the reasons we have such difficulty in defining the “humanities” today is that we are using a phrase which had meaning in classical antiquity (studia humanitatis), which has continued in usage through significant transformations of the world and western humanity’s worldview, but which no longer is related to its original meaning. According to Proctor we have lost touch with the classical humanities and their original purpose, which was to shape a better soul and a better human. In his opinion we do not even recognise, what we have lost and what it was ever used for, therefore Proctor insists that we as a society need to engage the classical tradition of the humanities, acknowledge what it meant, and incorporate it into our secondary and postsecondary education. Proctor notes that the use of the phrase “studia humanitatis” changed between classical antiquity and the Renaissance. This is arguably because the between the two periods, something else had happened: people had ceased to view themselves as parts of a whole society and cosmos, and had begun the process of distinguishing themselves as individuals separate from and potentially opposed to their state and their universe. Interestingly, Proctor avers, that we have achieved a state of “pathological narcissism” from which we must rescue ourselves for the sake of society and our own (self and individual) peace of mind. Why, then, have previous generations studied the classics when we have apparently abandoned them? Arguably this is because during the course of the degeneration from the classical mode to the current dystopia, there was a period of serval hundred years during which the study of classics were used to better the individual self; a personal and inwardly-focus self, to be sure, but nevertheless a noble effort a emulation of the relatively heroic behaviour of the ancients. Then following the development of classical philology which contributed towards the demise of the Greek and Latin in the schools, came along Marx and Freud and their various proposition divorcing the individual from any responsibility to previously compelling moral authorities.
Despite this, proctors defends the studying of classics and provides reasons to study it other than nostalgia. To him the reason to study both classical antiquity and the evolution (and death) of the humanities ‘is linked to the change he posits in the Western perception of the self. A passage from proctors work illuminates this more clearly. Of the post-classical struggle to perfect the self through the emulation of the anicents, he writes:
…the Greeks and the Romans are the only…models capable of such emulation. The reason is clear: from the Renaissance on, our literature knows nothing but personal selves. And the personal self, in all its glorious autonomy–which is also a form of isolation from both the cosmos and society–is too little, too weak, too “self-centered”–too imperfect in short, to inspire another human being to self-perfection. We can learn a great deal about ourselves and our experience of the human by reading…Hamlet. But if our goal is… [the] “perfecting” of a self, there is nothing in Hamlet to emulate. And it is not just a question of irreconcilable conflicts. Sophocles’ characters had conflicts. But…they were built into the very structure of being…. Sophocles’ tragic heroes believed in an objective moral order in the universe….(109-110)
Despite the validity of Proctor’s contention that classical languages used to be better taught, and could be well taught again, there is still some justification for the objection that requiring them of all students is unrealistic. Proctor’s suggested curriculum focuses on integrating the true humanities (Greek and Roman language, history and culture) into four-year college programs, with a high-school component as preparation for that endeavor. However, the implication of his work is that an education in Greek and Roman history and literature should be extended to every student, college-bound or not, who will live and work in a Western society, which is to say a society built upon classical principles and traditions. Yet, despite the belief that every practicing citizen needs this preparation, Proctor himself notes that “in classical Rome as well as in colonial America, the liberal arts tradition prepared men of the ruling classes to become statesmen, legislators, and good citizens” (205, emphasis mine). In the years when the classics were a larger part of the “standard” curriculum, the curriculum was offered to a much narrower range of students. What would be the result of requiring the classics of all students, in the way that we require literacy and numeracy? Would we have an enlightened society, or unparalleled drop-out rates?
Another issues raised by many educationist complain of too much state interference in education, by saying this they say provide a questionable assumption. This assumption is that the state and education are separate operations, areas of departments of existence, from a purely ‘educational’ point of view, therefore state interference in education is inappropriate; such interference transgresses a natural boundary and offends against the properties of identity for both education and state. However, a humanist education was brought during the Renaissance period in order to shape pupils characters, equipping them for the active life in order to benefit state and society. Therefore, can it be said that they offered little explicit training in morals, Grafton and Jardine conclude that the humanist teachers did not live up to the expectation. So why then did parents, civic governments, rulers or the church employ and support the humanist education. Was this is because the humanist education was not appealing because it created better men but rather because of its tedious philological and mnemonic methods.
With this in mind, can it be said that to continue to study classics, like languages and literature be self-indulgent; considering the Latin and that culture is considered by many as dead. The subject of Liberal Arts continues to be suctinized, as some would see the subject as pointless and not beneficial to society. Although, Professor Nigel Tubs makes some valid points in his book Philosophy and Modern Liberal Arts Education, he brings up the subject of freedom and describes how, “in the philosophy of Western history, the western individual is free to the extent that it understands freedom as education” . Freedom to learn without consequence and allows the individual to devolpe a cultural awareness and critical judgement. The idea of educational freedom, wasn’t first promoted by the new wave of thinkers but rather ancient philosophers
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The advocates for the early humanist revolt, wanted more than just the a re-evaluation of authors and texts , they sought to replace the scholastic teaching of logic with instruction in grammar and rhetoric for a new generation of civic-minded men. Even though this change invoked a return to the twelfth-century classroom- where teachers began to lecture on authors such as Virgil, Cicero, Juvenal and Lucan, we cannot underestimate the influence this had on the self-image of educational radicals and ultimately to transform the intellectual landscape of Europe. Consequently, the teachings of early philosopher started to be taught in the classroom and continues to be taught in the twenty first century.
Among the many philosophers of classical antiquity, two thinkers have exercised a wider and deeper influence upon educating than others, Plato and Aristotle. The controversy and interplay between Platonism and Aristotelianism has occupied a central place in many periods of Western thought , and even modern students will receive but an elementary introduction to Greek philosophy will inevitably get acquainted with the thought, and with some of the writings of Plato and Aristotle. For instance, the continuation of Modern Liberal Arts, which can be argued to be seen as the revival of a humanist education. By looking at history, philosophy and rhetoric it projects the same values that was once held centuries earlier. Nigel Tubbs argues that a modern notion of education for its own sake is to be founded in the discomfort of the ancient logics of identity. The most fundamental model of this education is where enlightenment claims to overcome ignorance but where, instead, the answer to the question only becomes another question needing an answer. Sometimes called the dialect of enlightenment, this is where education falls into regression. Similar to Socrates method of his use of question and answer. Subsquenlty, a modern liberal arts programme does not aim to train abstract thinkers instead it aims to provide a different voice of modern logic of education which redefines mediates its thought and speech by their truth in and as education.
So why should anyone be concerned with the social and political ideas of late thinks? Is it no flaiing a dead horse.
One significant figure, is Plato and his ideas on education. Through reading his work and it becomes apparent that his ideas and methods portrayed centuries ago is arguably still recognizable and used in a twenty-first century curriculum. The ‘Republic’ is nominally concerned with the question of what is justice? Consideration of this question leads to Plato, speaking through the person of Socrates, to outline his ideal society, which as a result led to the question of education being raised- in which the right kind of education being seen as a necessary condition of the perfect society.