Journal of Curriculum Studies

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The beginning of schooling - as we know it?

David Hamilton

To cite this article: David Hamilton (2015) The beginning of schooling - as we know it?, Journal
of Curriculum Studies, 47:5, 577-593, DOI: 10.1080/00220272.2015.1052851

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 J. CURRICULUM STUDIES, 2015
Vol. 47, No. 5, 577–593, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2015.1052851

The beginning of schooling - as we know it?

DAVID HAMILTON

This essay offers an account of the beginnings of modern schooling. The Latin word
schola began to mean ‘school’ in the nineth century. But early practices associated with
this newly distinct social phenomenon took several centuries to become codified, institu-
tionalized and recognized. Until that happened, school was a label or brand-image used
by purveyors of learning. Ideas about unified activity, method, order, discipline and effi-
ciency formed the foundation of institutional codification. Beginning in the Renaissance
and strengthened in the Reformation, codification reached a highpoint in the preparation
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of Comenius’ Didactica Magna in the middle of the seventeenth century. And these
assumptions about standardization and normalization have continued to nourish the
appeal of modern schooling for at least another 300 years.

Keywords: schooling; history; standardization; normalization

In 2013, the Journal of Curriculum Studies produced a special issue arising,

from a submission by Daniel Tanner, emeritus professor in the Graduate
School of Education, Rutgers University, USA. Tanner’s manuscript
lamented the fact that, in the USA, ‘teaching-to-the-test’ had risen to
become an ‘approved or “best” pedagogical practice’, something which
had ‘deleterious consequences for the school curriculum’ (2013, pp. 5,
4). The JCS editor, recognizing that these ‘angry’ judgements (Hopmann,
2013, p. 1), had wider implications, published them with invited con-
tributions from international members of the curriculum community, and
launched the collected contributions using the editorial provocation: ‘the
end of schooling as we know it?’
Tanner’s comments, like Hopmann’s editorial observations, struggled
with the thesis that, by the twenty-first century, schooling had become the
subject of reorientation and re-evaluation. Yet, none of the contributors
responded directly to Hopmann’s question about the future of schooling.
If schooling has had a beginning and a middle, might it also have an end?
Such speculation on the historical status of schooling is welcome. I
accept, with Tanner, that recent US policies overshadow the enduring
status of comprehensive secondary schooling; I am sympathetic with the
other contributors’ efforts at charting the global impact of neoliberal
ideas; and I share Hopmann’s worries about the future of schooling (see
for instance, Hamilton, 1988).

David Hamilton retired as a professor of Pedagogik, Umeã University in 2005; email:

david.hamilton80@btinternet.com. Previously, he held positions at Edinburgh, Glasgow
and Liverpool Universities. His research interests have included classroom life, curriculum
evaluation and the history of schooling. His most recent book, co-authored with Benjamin
Zufiaurre, is Blackboards and Bootstraps: The revisioning of education and Schooling b
(Rotterdam: Sense, 2013).
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
 578 D. HAMILTON

Fortunately, Hopmann’s editorial was neither didactic nor authoritar-

ian. He used a rhetorical question about ‘the end of schooling as we know
it?’ to stimulate debate among ‘readers and colleagues’ (Hopmann, 2013,
p. 3). Lamentation about deficiencies in popular schooling have, of course,
been composed and broadcast for centuries. But on this occasion, the
Journal of Curriculum Studies chose an alternative strategy. It did not
embark on the advancement of new policies and practices. Instead, it
considered the historicity of schooling.
On this occasion, I want to adopt a similar stance and, like Hopmann,
Tanner and their co-authors, revisit the changing state of schooling. To
achieve my aim, however, I turn Hopmann’s question upside down and
relate it to the empirical past rather than the speculative future. What,
then, might be construed as the beginning of schooling as we know it?
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Beginnings and precursors

Questions about the beginnings of schooling are conceptual and cultural

as well as chronological and historical. It is always possible to reach fur-
ther back and across the historical record, if only because all human prac-
tices have an economic and cultural setting. Equally, schooling and
education are also motivated by intergenerational intentions that are tran-
sient and, thus, liable to fade away.
This evanescence also makes it difficult to distinguish education from
schooling. The Latin etymology of the word education denotes a process
of ‘leading out’; pedagogy is its classical Greek synonym; and ‘upbringing’
is its closest English translation. As a practice, therefore, the process of
upbringing or education is as old as the human species. Schooling, on the
other hand, is uniquely human. It arises from human activity and its
institutional forms are easily discerned in the historical record—often by
the time such educational practices have become institutionalized.
Sadly, English-language sources focusing on this institutionalization
process are sparse and ethnocentric. Surviving artefacts which might
confirm the institutionalization of practices are missing. For instance, in
Literate Education in Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (1998), Teresa Morgan
claims, variously, that ‘it is impossible to identify any surviving
philosophical text as a “school text” as distinct from a “professional”
philosophical text’ (p. 17) and that ‘we have scarcely any archaeological
sites even tentatively identifiable as “school rooms”’ (p. 28). Accordingly,
she was led to conclude that: ‘in sum, we know almost nothing about the
institution of education in the classical period’ (p. 19; see also Beard,
2013; Too, 2001).
The problem of distinguishing beginnings from precursors, is also vis-
ited in Michel Rouche’s 700-page Histoire Ge´ne´rale de l’Enseignement et de
l’E´ducation en France: Des origines á la Renaissance (1981/2003). As his title
suggests, Rouche is careful to acknowledge that instructional practices—
l’enseignement and l’education—should be seen merely as precursors of
schooling. In a later work, translated into English, he uses an etymological
argument to make a similar point:
 THE BEGINNING OF SCHOOLING 579

The term schola, which once referred to the imperial guard, came to be
applied in turn to a train of warrior servants who waited on the king, to the
group of clergymen who waited on the bishop, to the monks of a monastery
and ultimately to a choral society; it did not mean ‘school’ before the ninth
century. (Rouche, 1987, p. 429)
Rouche’s thesis about the advent of schooling is, however, undeveloped
in both these cited texts. Fortunately, this tension between intentions and
artefacts finds a sympathetic resolution in C. Stephen Jaeger’s The Envy
of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200
(1994). Jaeger points to a French source, echoing Rouche, which suggests
that in the eight and nineth centuries, ‘there were no monastic schools,
properly speaking: nor are there schools in the monasteries … the school
was the monastery in its entirety’ (p. 383, note 37). Jaeger’s explanation
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is based on the thesis that, previously, the ‘the most ancient form of peda-
gogy’ comprised ‘imitation of the teacher’ such that the ‘essence of
instruction’ revolved around the ‘physical presence of the teacher’ whose
way of life and ‘personal charisma’ provided ‘the curriculum’ (p. 76).
The potency of such charismatic teaching had, it seems, begun to fade
by the twelfth century. The old learning, ‘manners without letters’ (p. 228),
was ‘moved out of real life’ (i.e. the immediate presence of teachers) and
became ‘thoroughly textualised’ in the form of a ‘didactic and imaginative
literature’ (p. 14). Charismatic teaching was repackaged or recycled with an
explicitly instructional intention (e.g. texts designed for Latin instruction).
And, in turn, this textualized repackaging favoured independent,
free-moving teachers who, basing their teaching on such portable texts,
operated outside the immediate jurisdiction and control of the church.

Purveyors of learning

Such institutionalization of education eventually went public—by gradually

moving into the market place, a transition recorded in a fresco painted by
Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c1290–1348) that is still to be found in the town hall
of Sienna, Italy. Lorenzetti’s representation in Allegory of Good Government:
Effects of Good Government in the City (1330–1340, available online),
includes a bustling market place where a teacher has set up shop in a cov-
ered arcade between a shoemaker and a butcher. The market-place setting
is also suggestive in other ways. In what sense were these teachers also spon-
sored by local governments instead of the church—Grendler, for instance,
claims that, in Italy, ‘most’ ecclesiastical schools had been replaced by
communal or independent schools by 1300 (1989, p. 6). And in what sense,
if any, did these ‘masters’ follow other traders by institutionalising their
practices through the operation of self-regulating guilds?
Positioned beyond the immediate institutional influence of church and
university, these teachers took up the challenge and prospects of textual-
ization. Two English-language sources offer illumination of this transition:
Nicholas Orme’s Medieval Schools from Roman Britain to Renaissance
England (2006); and Robert Black’s Humanism and Education in Medieval
and Renaissance Italy (2001).
 580 D. HAMILTON

Both authors recognize that there were many ‘purveyors of learning’

(Orme, 2006, p. 165) in the Middle Ages and that it is difficult, if not
ahistorical, to describe their work as centred on purpose-built schools
where cohorts or classes of learners follow syllabuses and curricula.
Instead, they build their accounts on the study of texts deemed to have
been used for teaching young learners. ‘It is not easy’, Orme accepted, to
‘pass from the curriculum to the pupils and their surroundings’ (p. 31)
since for a ‘long time’ after the twelfth century, it is rarely possible for
historians to distinguish ‘professional teachers’ from ‘part-time, clerical or
semi-clerical teachers’ (p. 165) who circulated between churches and
wealthy families. Collectively, however, these purveyors of learning had
begun to map out and colonize a ‘world of instruction’ (McClintock,
1971).
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Populated by texts designed to advance access to Latin, this world

had a complex form. What were these texts? How were they to be used?
Were they written for teachers or learners? Were they instructional texts?
Or merely moral texts for self-improvement? Orme’s text repeatedly visits
such questions. He includes an illustration is of a 10th-century psalter
describing it as a religious text ‘for teaching reading until well after the
Reformation’ (p. 34). Yet, no evidence is provided to indicate that it was,
in fact, used for this purpose rather than, for instance, as a text for
‘devotional or liturgical use’—one of the definitions in the Shorter Oxford
English Dictionary. Orme also refers to the Doctrinale of Alexander of
Ville-Dieu as a ‘teaching manual’ written ‘for the education of the …
nephews [of the Bishop of Dol, Brittany] in about 1190’ (p. 90).
Although it ‘became used almost universally’ its status as a school—i.e.
pre-university—text is undermined by the fact that, in 1366, it was even
prescribed as a set book by the University of Paris’ (p. 91). From Orme’s
account—the fact that it was used by students ‘right through the curricu-
lum’—allows that it may have been more of a reference source than a
Latin primer.
Other texts, however, can be more easily ascribed as serving instruc-
tional purposes. Orme indicates that between the eleventh and the six-
teenth centuries, instructional texts were sometimes preceded with an
alphabet which, itself, had a cross before the A and ‘amen’ after the final
character. The cross served as a visual prompt for learners who launched
their reading with the invocation ‘Christ’s cross speed me’ and concluded
their efforts with ‘amen’ (p. 56).
Robert Black confronts the uncertainties raised by Orme. He studied
1305 manuscript texts initially ascribed to ‘school authors’ and produced
around the Northern Italian city of Florence. Adopting a cautious stance,
however, Black judges that only 324 (25%) show evidence of having been
‘used in grammar (i.e. Latin) schools in the period up to the end of the
15th century’ (Appendix IV). What evidence did he use? Some texts were
explicitly prepared for doctores puerum (teachers of children, p. 55); while
other texts incorporated literary devices to support children’s learning.
These devices included distinct introductory material (accessus, p. 314),
key phrases or maxims (sententia, p. 320), summaries (summa, p. 171),
and using alphabets to fill the space at the end of texts (p. 262).
 THE BEGINNING OF SCHOOLING 581

Black’s most significant contribution to the understanding of medieval

education was his forensic scrutiny of the texts themselves. By focusing
on the glosses and marginalia added by later copyists and readers, he was
able to gain a sense of the history of such texts. His analysis builds upon
evidence of schoolboys’ ‘scribbling’ (probationes pennae, p. 311), signatures
added by successive users/readers/owners of the texts (p. 202), line-by-line
vernacular (Italian) translations inserted into the original Latin text
(‘interlinear vernacular glossing’, p. 276, see also pp. 327–328), and the
existence of grammatical and textual comment—paraphrases or explica-
tions—inserted around the original text (p. 327).
Black’s painstaking reporting includes an awareness of the fluidity that
surrounded the preparation and use of successive versions of texts.
Medieval authors, that is, restructured texts for various reasons. As copyists
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as much as authors, they highlighted different aspects of grammar, they

converted prose into verse (and vice versa); they responded to the wishes of
their individual or corporate employers and, not least, they adjusted their
texts according to the prevailing ‘needs of teaching’ (Black, p. 101).
In responding to these needs, purveyors of learning turned into
schoolmasters who, in turn, remodelled the material context of instruc-
tion. Orme, for instance, provides the following remodelling information,
derived from his own data on English sources:
• The earliest purpose-built schoolroom was included in the erection
of Winchester school at the end of the fourteenth century (p. 138).
• The school day in free-standing institutions is not detailed until the
mid-fifteenth century when the statutes of endowed schools began
to lay down how the day should function (p. 143).
• The earliest recorded use of school-owned printed schoolbooks is
1498 (p. 155).
• The earliest ‘detailed evidence’ about a schoolroom is 1518
(p. 139).
• The division of schools into permanent classes is not mentioned
until the 1520s (p. 143).
• The earliest school notebooks date from ‘soon after 1400’ (p. 111).
• The earliest surviving school timetables date from between 1528
and 1530 (p. 123).
Throughout his text, however, Orme carefully emphasized the uncer-
tainty of such summary conclusions. He was well aware that his evidence
might be ‘weaker than desirable’ (p. 48) and that ‘our knowledge of med-
ieval schools is accidental [i.e. due to the chance survival of documentary
evidence]’ (p. 189). Despite using rhetorical phrases like ‘it is possible
that’ (p. 26), ‘it may be significant that’ (p. 45) and ‘[it] is difficult to
say’ (p. 29), his data cumulatively suggest that schooling was beginning to
take its modern shape in the latter part of the Middle Ages. Indeed, Orme
summarizes his position as follows:
Schooling … was a trade which (especially in the later Middle Ages) teach-
ers were left alone to practise and parents to patronise. It was an everyday
thing that was taken for granted. These attitudes persisted until well into
 582 D. HAMILTON

the sixteenth century. Only with the coming of the Reformation was the
role of schools reassessed as something crucial to the good of Church and
state. (p. 204)

Reform and reformation

What changes, then, were associated with the 16th-century Reforma-

tion? In England, questions about ‘what was happening?’ and ‘why was
it happening?’ are still difficult to adjudicate, having been debated at
length by educationists and historian (see, for instance, the review in
Moran, 1985, Chapter 1, and Orme’s ‘Reflections’, 2006, Chapter 11).
Nevertheless, Moran’s conclusion about the politics of education and
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schooling seem to reflect the general view that educational practice

shifted its attention away from regimes sponsored by the established
church. ‘It is clear’, she wrote in the 1980s, that by 1500 ‘the late med-
ieval clergy no longer dominated the educational sphere or even the edu-
cated elite’. ‘As a result’, she adds, these changes ‘may have ultimately
worked to the disadvantage of the Church’ (1985, p. 226). Her judge-
ment, therefore, hints at the rise of a new, lay elite who sought to
extend their power by intervening in two areas of schooling: (1) state or
corporate regulation of schoolteachers; and (2) standardization of the
conduct of schools.
Further, support for this thesis can be found outside the framework of
Moran’s investigation—from at least three separate sources. First, there is
the evidence that the words syllabus, class, curriculum and didactics took
their modern form across Europe after 1500 (see, variously, Hamilton,
1989, 2002, 2009; Martial, 1985). If nothing else, such ideas provided a
discursive framework for the institutionalization of schooling that was
easily communicated, disseminated and adopted. Secondly, this discourse
resonated with the wider political intentions of reformers like Luther and
Calvin. As the current Oxford University Professor of Early Modern
Intellectual History suggested:
The project of indoctrinating and disciplining an entire population had
never been undertaken with the seriousness with which it was being
attempted around 1580, and for this new project a different approach to
education was needed. (Hotson, 2000, pp. 23–24)
And a final contribution to Moran’s hypothesis is the evidence and
argument of Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine’s From Humanism to the
Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth-century Europe
(1986). Like other authors, they focus on the transformation of instruc-
tion, examining the teaching of the humanities (viz. classical literature) in
the period between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Like Black
and Grendler, they note that Italian purveyors of knowledge (grammar
teachers) had begun to turn away from medieval scholastic sources in
favour of classical authors like Cicero. This infusion of classical (or
humanist) ideas created a situation where, Black suggests:
 THE BEGINNING OF SCHOOLING 583

In antiquity only one language was being taught, but now during the
Renaissance in effect two languages were involved: first the pupil learned
medieval Latin from the grammarians and then classical Latin from the
humanists. (Black, 2001, p. 365)
Grafton and Jardine’s thesis is that the needs of teaching addressed by
humanist tutors, like Guarino Guarini (1374–1460), suffered in a
tension between scholasticism (medieval practice) and humanism, with
humanism suffering as a consequence. The ‘development of a system-
atized programme of arts training in Northern Europe out of the
cumulative and unstructured educational practice of early Italian human-
ism … led to a convenient confusion of the “methodical” with the
“morally sound”’ (1986, p. 149). Was the goal of education to make a
student a born-again ‘new man’? Or was it merely the ‘transmission of
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necessary literary skills’ (pp. 3–4). To illustrate their standpoint, Grafton

and Jardine offer case studies of two tutors, one of whom offered ‘inti-
mate attention to individual boys’ while the other merely ‘drew up daily
timetables’ (p. 151).
Insofar as such instruction by schoolteachers offered an ‘instrumental
and pragmatic brand of humanism’, the humanist aspirations of the
Renaissance were blunted. To illustrate this aspect of their thesis, Grafton
and Jardine cite Quintilian’s classical ideal of the orator as a ‘a good man,
who excels in the art of discourse’, suggesting that this humanist goal was
replaced by an image of the pragmatic orator—someone who merely gath-
ers ‘concrete facts’ which serve as the intellectual ‘ammunition’ basic to
public erudition (pp. xiii, 197, 192 and 188n).
As a result, teaching derived from humanist sources no longer carried
the expectation that successful students would be good and pious men.
Through these changes, humanism mutated into the humanities, ‘a study
of the art of speaking, rather than of knowing’. Humanist qualities of
‘learnedness’ or ‘philosophical understanding’ faded in the wake of the
textualization of humanism and the associated creation of school courses
(Grafton & Jardine, 1986, p. 194, 195; Ong, 1958, passim). Indeed,
Grafton & Jardine suggest humanism ceased to be the emblem of a ‘good
man’; instead, it merely offering ‘a route to high government office’
(p. 189). Anticipating Hotson, they also note that such erudition was
‘made to order for the Europe of the Counter-Reformation and of late
Protestant orthodoxy’ (p. xiv).
Grafton and Jardine’s ideas have been criticized by other Renaissance
historians (see, for instance, Black, 2001, p. 17) but there is no doubt
that, through the sixteenth century, the form and language of schooling
began to crystallize into an institution easily recognized with the hind-
sight available to 21st-century educationists. The late-medieval innova-
tions identified by Orme were captured in texts, adopted by teachers and
disseminated from school to school. In short, ‘purveyors of learning’
eventually became both the carriers and the victims of standardization
and normalization. And their efforts mark the beginnings of modern
schooling.
 584 D. HAMILTON

Standardization and normalization

Such changes, however, were not instantaneous. A sense of their scale

and form can be gleaned from the educational writings of Richard
Mulcaster (c1531–1611). According to his most recent biographer—
Jacqueline Cousin-Desjobert (2013, pp. 22–23)—Mulcaster was born in
Carlisle in the north of England, attended Eton College, went on to
King’s College and Peterhouse College, Cambridge University and spent
a year at Christ’s College, Oxford University. Continuing his studies in
Greek and Hebrew, he also became a Burgess and member of the first
English Parliament of Elisabeth I in 1559 (which lasted four months).
While living in London, he married the daughter of a spice merchant and
occupied himself as a schoolmaster. His success in the last activity was
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sufficiently newsworthy for him to become the first head master of

Merchant Taylors’ school (1561–1583) and, after running a boarding
house for girls and serving as a tutor/schoolmaster elsewhere, head of St
Paul’s school, also in London (1596–1608).
Mulcaster’s experiences at the Merchant Taylors’ school are reflected
in two texts: (1) Positions, Wherein those Primitive Circumstances be Exam-
ined, Which are Necessary for the Training up of Children, Either for Skill in
their Book, or Health in their Bodie (1581/1995, hereafter Positions) and (2)
The First Part of the Elementarie which Entreaties Chefelie of the Right Writing
of our English Tung (1582/1970, hereafter Elementarie). Like many books
produced in the sixteenth century, Mulcaster’s texts were not paradigms of
standardization. They were not only repetitious but, despite Gutenberg,
also typeset with many errors and eccentricities. Taken together, they com-
prised an educational intervention spread over 576 printed pages divided
in two parts ‘chiefly for the printer’ (Elementarie, epistle).
Mulcaster, however, was more than an erudite schoolmaster serving a
London elite. His erudition was emblematic of something else. In the second
half of the sixteenth century, as Cousin-Desjobert notes, ‘it is impossible to
disassociate … an erudite grammar-school teacher from the influence of con-
temporaneous humanist currents’ (2013, p. 9). Like many of his northern
European peers, Mulcaster not only corresponded in several languages, he
also linked his humanist interests to the reform and reaffirmation of Protes-
tant practice—a major initiative of the early years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign
(1558–1603). To overcome the religious schisms that had troubled the first
half of the sixteenth century, the English Parliament passed the Act of
Supremacy (1558), which confirmed the Church of England’s separation
from Rome; and the Act of Uniformity (1559) which, among other things,
required the English population to attend church on Sundays using the Book
of Common Prayer—a protestant, English-language liturgy.
The new forms of worship took time to become routine but, by 1580,
Mulcaster had come to accept that reform of educational practice was cen-
tral to the Protestant project. And his contribution to educational thought
and protestant practice was refracted through his prolonged experience as
a schoolmaster. His contribution, that is, can be contrasted with the earlier
efforts of Thomas Elyot (c1490–1546) who published the The Book Named
the Governour in 1531/1962 and Roger Ascham (1518–1568), who
 THE BEGINNING OF SCHOOLING 585

published The Scholemaster in 1570/1898 (i.e. posthumously). Elyot and

Ascham, of an earlier generation than Mulcaster, wrote for different
audiences. Elyot’s volume was directed towards elite families—the source
of future governors while Ascham’s volume was ‘specially prepared’ for the
‘private bringing up of youth in gentlemen and noblemen’s houses’ (title
page).
Ascham’s use of schoolmaster in his title might appear misleading but
it was consonant with the medieval idea that the community of school-
masters could be seen as a guild, if only because they shared the same
goal (teaching Latin) and used similar tools (texts designed for that pur-
pose). Nevertheless, such self-claimed (medieval?) schoolmasters were not
exempt from Ascham’s criticism. Their work meant that young people
were ‘driven to hate learning, before they know what learning is’ and that
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their ‘love of learning’ was being extinguished by their ‘fear of beating’.

Ascham’s reformed and humanist ‘scholemaster’ was to provide the ‘right
order of teaching, and honesty of living, for the good upbringing of chil-
dren and young men’ and, in doing so, was expected to fill the gap
between childhood and such time as the ‘the scholar is made able to go
to the university’ (preface).
Besides their humanist concerns, all three authors—Elyot, Ascham
and Mulcaster—had something else in common. Their writings celebrated
the ideal of the ‘common weal’ (an English translation of Res Publica).
Each believed that education or schooling could make a contribution to
the organization, regulation and governance of the public sphere. While
Elyot highlighted the training of governors and Ascham wrote for noble
men, Mulcaster’s educational proposals were focused elsewhere. His dis-
cussions, opinions and proposals were directed, on the one hand, at mem-
bers of the emergent, urban mercantile and commercial elites and, on the
other hand, at promoting learning as a means of extending the ‘soul of a
state’ (Positions, p. 135). Given the complexity of Reformation politics in
England, educational writings of the sixteenth century appealed to differ-
ent audiences, each struggling to revise or reform the changing boundaries
of the commonwealth, itself buffeted by the growth of mercantilism,
corporatism, empire and colonialism. It is no accident that the phrase
‘British Empire’ was first used by an adviser to Queen Elisabeth, John
Dee, in 1577 (see Ronald, 2007, p. 20).
Ascham had been tutor to Princess Elizabeth—the future Queen of
England; and Elyot had served as adviser to the Monarch and as ambas-
sador to the Holy Roman Emperor. But Mulcaster merely served as a
member of the House of Commons—a lower rank in the national hierar-
chy. Despite his origins and upbringing, Mulcaster was writing as much
for a metropolitan as a landed or clerical audience. The Company of
Merchant Taylors founded its school in 1561, having receiving a fresh
Royal Charter in 1503, one that upgraded its status to a merchant,
international, trading company from a craft guild (of ‘Tailors and Linen
armourers’) originally founded in 1327. In a similar way, St Pauls School
—which began life as a cathedral school—was refounded in 1512, with
the Mercers’ (luxury cloth merchants) Company providing its corporate
trustees.
 586 D. HAMILTON

Method, order and efficiency

Mulcaster’s extensive writings also constitute a window on many aspects

of 16th-century life—Cousin-Desjobert’s biography, for instance, origi-
nated as a doctorate in Renaissance studies. My intention in this essay is,
however, relatively narrow: to exploit Mulcaster’s focus on the changing
regime of 16th-century English schooling, particularly as it underwent
reform to serve the political, social and confessional interests of
Elizabethan Protestantism. On the basis of his two major texts, five issues
seem to have been uppermost in Mulcaster’s mind: (1) reducing diversity
to a uniform provision; (2) strengthening the idea that public schooling
should serve the common weal; (3) extending schooling further into the
‘common[s]’; (4) advancing secularization through the use of vernacular
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languages; and (5) developing the idea that concepts of method and order
are central to the organization of schooling.
Converting diversity into uniformity appears to have been the stron-
gest of Mulcaster’s concerns. He returned to it repeatedly. The existing
‘great variety of teaching’, he believed, ‘seems to call for some uniform
way’ (Positions, p. 5). ‘The very end of my whole labour’ he wrote in the
dedication to Queen Elizabeth I, ‘is to help to bring the general teaching
in your majesty’s dominions, to some one good and profitable uniformity’.
By such action he believed he was augmenting the work of ‘that noble
prince King Henry VIII’, who had reigned 1509–1547, and who had
‘vouchsafed to bring all grammars into one form, the multitude thereof
being some impediment to school learning’. Mulcaster’s views on unifor-
mity also extended to schoolbooks and instruction. There is value, he
added in the dedication, in ‘reducing all other school books to some bet-
ter choice; and all manner of teaching, to some readier form’.
Mulcaster’s view of uniform teaching was politically-motivated,
echoing the aspiration of the Act of Uniformity. Reform or redirection was
needed along a ‘right way’ (Elementarie, p. 100). Learners should follow a
course of life, a direction that, with the ‘limiting of things’, comprised
‘what to do and what to learn, how to do and how to learn, where, when,
and so forth to do that, which signs [represents] the behaviour, and to
learn that which enhances knowledge’ (Positions, p. 291). Uniformity also
carried a sense of certainty. Children are ‘of themselves … ignorant’ such
that they must have ‘certainty to direct them’ and that this ‘certainty must
especially be set sure, and not less soundly kept, in schools for learning,
in private houses for behaviour, in churches for religion, because those
three places, be the greatest abodes, that children have’ (Positions,
p. 291). Overall, ‘certainty in direction’ would create a ‘marvellous prof-
itable kind of regime’ (Positions, p. 293).
Accordingly, Mulcaster’s view of the common weal resonated with a
view of Protestant uniformity or orthodoxy. To this end, he seems to have
made a distinction between ‘public ordinance’ and ‘private discipline at
home’ (Positions, p. 29); that is, between the regulation of public and pri-
vate life. The common weal embraced the public sphere. It operated as a
‘ship’ with the people as its passengers (Positions, p. 245). Moreover,
Mulcaster felt that public learning strengthened the viability of the ship of
 THE BEGINNING OF SCHOOLING 587

state. When learning has been acquired, it ‘spreads throughout the state as
sinews, veins and arteries do through a natural body’ (Elementarie, p. 233).
And in the epistle written for the Elementarie, Mulcaster added that ‘peace-
fulness is the end of all government, as learning is the mean[s]’.
Mulcaster’s position was that schooling provides more than domestic
education. Even though ‘a wife and a learned parent’ are the ‘very best
part of the very best teacher’ (Elementarie, p. 5), schooling underpins the
preparation of learned citizens who can ‘serve abroad’ [i.e. in the public
sphere] in the ‘public functions of the common weal’ (Elementarie,
epistle). In other words, Mulcaster believed that public learning had the
‘force of common use’ (Elementarie, p. 101) and served ‘for the good of
us all’ (Elementarie, p. 235). Mulcaster, however, was not an advocate of
universal schooling. While accepting that all, including ‘young maidens’,
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should be ‘put to learn’ such that ‘all may learn to write and read without
danger’ (Positions, p. 132), he expressed ‘two great doubts’ about the exis-
tence of ‘too many learned’ (Positions, pp. 133, 134). He felt that the
‘male side’ should be ‘set to school’ but worried whether this prescription
be applied to ‘all children’ and, if not, what should be the basis of selec-
tion (Positions, p. 133)? ‘For the male side’, however, his view was clear:
That doubt is long ago out of doubt; they should be set to school, to qual-
ify themselves, to learn how to be religious and loving, how to govern and
obey, how to forecast and prevent how to defend and assail and in short,
how to perform that excellently by labour, whereunto they are born but
rudely by nature. (Positions, p. 133)
Mulcaster’s primary interest, it seems, was not universal schooling, but in
extending learning to the ‘middle sort of parent’, those who were neither
in possession of ‘too much wealth’ nor struggling with ‘too much want’
(Positions, p. 140). He described this social constituency as ‘the common’
(e.g. Positions, p. 194). This label dates from 1341 when the Parliament
of England divided itself into two chambers or houses. Henceforth, the
House of Commons, was occupied by knight and burgesses (urban
office-holders) who met separately from the House of Lords occupied by
members of the Nobility and Clergy. Although Mulcaster served in the
House of Commons before writing his major texts, he was not opposed to
the House of Lords or the Monarchy. His life as a schoolmaster had
merely led him, I suggest, to the view that the pedagogy advocated by
Asham and Elyot was insufficient to the mercantile circumstances of the
sixteenth century.
But this connection between commerce and schooling was nothing
new. It was already marked in Lorenzetti’s 14th-centry Allegory, and
Orme comments that ‘a common location’ for medieval schools was a
‘street on the edge of the commercial sector’ (2006, p. 136). The main
difference, however, between medieval and 16th-century practice has
already been touched upon. Public schooling had become a corporate
rather than a craft concern; and such corporate activity was linked to the
acquisition and consolidation of political power. Mulcaster’s view was that
the knowledge (or cultural capital) previously offered to families of the
 588 D. HAMILTON

nobility should not only be reformed (i.e. brought up to date) but also
extended to members of the ‘common’. To this end, Mulcaster’s writings
devote much attention to social status and social structure in the sixteenth
century.
What, for instance, does it mean to be a gentleman or nobleman (see,
e.g. Positions, pp. 193ff.)? Mulcaster’s educational argument seems to be
that the knowledge conventionally associated with the nobility (e.g. skills
in horsemanship, dance and weaponry, Positions, p. 198) should be
extended to such learning that would ‘serve’ the ‘honour of our state and
country’ (Positions, p. 197). A ‘good and virtuous education’ was neces-
sary to create a new variety of ‘noble and gentleman’. Such learning,
spread among both the commons and the nobility, should promote ‘wis-
dom in policy, valiance in execution, justice in deciding [and] modesty in
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demeanour’ (Positions, pp. 201, 200). In turn, such ‘gentlemanly qualities’

would also be implicated in members of the commons if they could ‘read,
write, draw, sing, play, to have language, learning, health and activity, nay
even to profess divinity, law, physics and any trade else commendable for
cunning [knowledge or erudition]’ (Positions, p. 208).
A further consequence of Mulcaster’s views on public schooling
was his advocacy of vernacular instruction. His membership of an
international network of aware and/or exiled humanists, together with
his sponsorship by merchant guilds allowed him to appreciate the inte-
gration of England into Europe and, at the same time, the gradual
inclusion of other languages, besides Latin, into the workings of the
common weal: ‘No tongue is naturally more fine than any other but
by the industry of the speaker’ (Elementarie, p. 253). He was writing at
a time when Machiavelli (1469–1527) had written The Prince in Italian
and Montaigne (1533–1592) had published his Essais in French in
1580. Mulcaster felt that ‘diligent labour of learned countrymen’ could
be applied to learning any language. ‘Why not, I pray you’, he asks,
‘as well in English as either in Latin or any other tongue’ (Elementarie,
p. 255). Indeed, his final comment is ‘Why not all in English, a ton-
gue of itself both deep in conceit [conception], and frank in delivery?’
(Elementarie, p. 258).
The fifth and final recurrent theme in Mulcaster’s work is his atten-
tion to the organization of school instruction. He ‘ventured’ into print, he
suggests, to help the ‘course of learning’ and to help the ‘trade of teach-
ing’ (Elementarie, p. 234). To do this, he built on his humanist connec-
tions and marshalled the ‘best authority’ of classical sources. His
experience as a schoolmaster had taught him that the ‘ordinary and old’
course of elementary instruction would be difficult to ‘turn’ and would
‘not lightly be changed’ (Elementarie, pp. 8, 7, 6).
Mulcaster’s views embraced not only the purpose of schooling but
also its conduct. Building on the orthodox aspirations of the English
Reformation, his proposed regime of instruction—his ‘general platform’—
emphasized the leitmotif of pan-European reforms in education and
schooling: ‘method and order’ (Elementarie, p. 52). Like other Europeans
who wrote at the same time (reported in Ong, 1958, Chapter 11: The
method of method), Mulcaster sought to increase the efficiency of
 THE BEGINNING OF SCHOOLING 589

schooling. His premise was that if the ‘teacher may deliver plainly with
order’, it would inevitably follow that the ‘learner [may] receive quickly
with profit’ (Elementarie, p. 53).
Mulcaster felt that this reorganization of teaching was possible
because ‘our custom [way of life] has grown so orderable’ (Elementarie,
p. 78) such that ‘all the principle[s?] may be well learned singly, in their
natural order’ (Elementarie, p. 233). Although not acknowledged, this
belief in the natural order of things echoes the taxonomic or systematic
ordering of nature proposed by Peter Ramus (1515–1572), a professor at
the University of Paris whose writings influenced the emergence of the
curriculum idea. Ramus’ contribution to the work of schoolmasters was
twofold. First, he created a map of knowledge which identified designated
elements of learning. Secondly, he linked these elements hierarchically—
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in the same way that knowledge can be divided into arts and sciences
each of which can be subdivided further (e.g. into physics, chemistry and
biology) and further still (e.g. physical chemistry and organic chemistry).
Thus, for Ramus and his followers (discussed in Hotson, 2007), teaching
or learning of a curriculum entailed examining these topics and, in turn,
linking them to other saliences on the map of knowledge. In effect,
Ramus advanced a fundamental curriculum idea—that instruction is
based on following a course that makes connections across a map of
knowledge. And it is for this reason, perhaps, that Mulcaster believed that
schooling should not be distracted by ‘diverse things’ and, instead, be
based on an orderable practice which would ‘assure the profit without loss
of time or lingering by the way’ (Elementarie, p. 234).
To summarize, it is not easy to discern Mulcaster’s motivation but it
seems that he offered a curricular view of schooling deeply informed by
considerations about method, order, discipline and efficiency. He drew
these considerations from, among other things, humanist and reformation
reappraisals of theology, philosophy and politics. Mediated in different
ways by the diverse circumstances of the European Reformation, a central
concern of schoolteachers became sharing the ‘organization of the matter
they were teaching’ (Ong, 1958, p. 228).

Schooling across Europe

Three other international innovations illustrate how this concern was

addressed in the sixteenth century: reformulation of the word ‘method’,
creation of the Jesuit’s Ratio studiorum, and reform of the Christian cate-
chism. For many years, the word method had denoted the elaboration of
logical procedures for the creation and accumulation of new knowledge.
Medieval scholasticism, for instance, is sometimes represented in terms of
its extended, if not tortuous, methodological argumentation. For Renais-
sance teachers, however, the idea of method took a new turn. It referred
to the convergent reorganization of teaching—its reduction, in extreme
cases, to a ‘savage simplicity’ (Ong, 1958, p. 235). In one sense, this
arose from a remapping of the logical pathways to knowledge proposed
 590 D. HAMILTON

by Peter Ramus, an innovator remembered by the American Renaissance

scholar, Hardin Craig, as the ‘greatest master of the short-cut the world
has ever known’ (see Ong, 1958, p. 3).
Thus, Johannes Sturm (1507–1589), Lutheran Rector of Strasburg
Gymnasium in the middle years of the sixteenth century, came to regard
method as a ‘certain, short and direct way, a kind of short cut … which is
simple, and clear, and straightforward’. Method, therefore, was reduced
to a recipe—a ‘routine of efficiency’ that became central to the organiza-
tion of didactics (see Ong, 1958, pp. 232–233, 225; Gilbert, 1960). In
one case, reported by Jill Kraye, an Oldenburg (North Germany) school-
master, Georg Andreas Fabricius (1589–1694), methodically reorganized
his teaching so that students would acquire ‘all human knowledge in little
over a year’ (Kraye, 1995, p. 110). With Ramus’ assistance, method had
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become the message as well as the medium.

The second notable innovation of the sixteenth century was the cre-
ation of the Ratio Studiorum by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). Taking more
than 50 years to prepare, the authorized version of the Ratio Studiorum,
issued in 1599, was a scheme of studies or schooling based on procedural
rules for individual officials and classes that, according to Mir (1968),
had its origins in the ‘Modus Parisiensis’ developed in the University of
Paris, a century earlier. By that stage in their history, missions of the
Society of Jesus had already reached beyond Europe to Japan, China,
India and Brazil. European schooling, that is, had begun to go global.
The final significant 16th-century innovation entailed the reform of
catechesis or educational questioning. Teaching based on standard
questions—often directed at biblical knowledge—was much older (see, for
instance, Rouche, 2003, p. 252). But the influential innovation of the
1500s was the standardization of the answers as well as the questions.
Catechesis was turned from a questioning to a questioning-and-answering
practice (see, for instance, Green, 1996; Dhotel, 1967). Accordingly, such
practices served the diverse theological and political aims embodied in
Luther’s Little Catechism (1529), the Calvinist Heidelberg Catechism (1563)
and the catholic Summa Doctrinae Christianae (or Catechismus Major,
1554). Adoption of reformation catechisms not only enhanced the effi-
ciency of oral and written instruction but also created a format for the
production of schoolbooks. Subsequently, for instance, a 19th-century
schoolmaster/bookseller, William Pinnock (1782–1843), produced a series
of catechisms in the nineteenth century that, among other things, covered
the fields of English grammar, French grammar, singing, geology and
chess.
Overall, my suggestion is that these interconnected developments in
the sixteenth century contributed to the idea that schooling could be orga-
nized around rational and fail-safe methods. Efficiently-delivered instruc-
tion would necessarily yield the desired effect—erudition. Through such
reform, schooling would ceased to be undermined by the diversity
allowed—wittingly or unwittingly—by medieval purveyors of learning.
Henceforth, schooling was idealized as a totalising project, the founda-
tional assumption of Johann Amos Comenius’ Didactica Magna—a work
completed in the middle years of the seventeenth century. Between
 THE BEGINNING OF SCHOOLING 591

Ramus (1515–1572) and Comenius (1592–1670), schooling had become

reformed as an institution for ‘teaching all things to all men’ using meth-
ods ‘by which teachers may teach less, but learners may learn more’
(Comenius, 1635/1967, title page and fly sheets).
These assumptions about the delivery of knowledge nourished the ori-
gins, ideology and appeal of modern schooling. Despite many problems,
including the growth of knowledge through the scientific revolution of the
seventeenth century, these assumptions survived. Mediated by the indus-
trial revolution of the eighteenth century, they underpinned the creation
of popular schooling in the early years of the nineteenth century and
reigned supreme at least until the twentieth century.
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Conclusion

This essay offers an account of the beginnings of modern schooling—as

we know it. It arises from a sustained effort to fill the gap that lies
between 9th-century uses of the Latin word schola and the 16th-century
creation of the lexicon of modern schooling.
It acknowledges that, after the eighth century the label ‘school’ began
to be associated with the textualization of inherited knowledge, a process
that initiated the separation of education from schooling (examined fur-
ther in Hamilton & Zufiaurre, 2013). In turn, the existence of textual
knowledge promoted the growth of an instructional literature repeatedly
adapted and recycled by successive generations of purveyors of knowl-
edge. And, by the end of the fifteenth century, the diversity of instruc-
tional practices followed by the teachers of Latin began to be codified as
part of a European lexicon of schooling. Finally, during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries this codification was further strengthened, leading,
for instance, to Comenius’ belief in the Great Didactic.
Evidence for this argument is drawn largely from secondary and
Anglophone sources. Accordingly, my interpretations should be read
more as an invitation than a conclusion. The investigation remains
unfinished. There is a need to rework Orme’s medieval sources accord-
ing to Black’s standards; there is undoubted merit in penetrating further
in the politics of the Reformation; and it is worth focusing more closely
on Mulcaster’s texts by comparing them, for instance, with 17th-century
equivalents such as John Brinsley’s Ludus Literarius: or, the Grammar
Schoole (1612/1968), Charles Hoole’s, A New Discovery Of The Old Art
Of Teaching Schoole (1660/1969) and parallel European and North
American texts.
The question mark in the title of this essay should, therefore, be read
as an indication of uncertainty. In parallel with Hopmann’s conjectures
about the end of schooling, many questions about the beginning of
schooling still remain provisional. Their resolution, at least for this author,
is likely to require another lifetime’s work. Meanwhile, if this essay pro-
vokes others to reconceptualize and recalibrate education and schooling,
it will have been worth writing.
 592 D. HAMILTON

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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