References

What follows are some important reference materials ... ancient and modern ... which grapple with questions about "education".

Vergerius: The New Education by P. P. Vergerius the Elder (1370-1444)

Vergerius was a teacher at Florence, Bologna, and Padua. He was present at the Council of Constance, and later worked for the Emperor Sigismund.

Soon after 1400, he wrote the first important Renaissance treatise on education for Ubertino, the son of Francesco Carrara, lord of Padua. Printed here, it represented a sort of humanist program. It does discuss the medieval trivium and quadrivium, along with the traditional disciplines of medicine, law and theology. But the stress is on the newer “liberal studies,” of history, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and literature.

Of the education of children by Michel de Montaigne (1533 - 1592)

Montaigne's essay was in fact a letter to a French countess with questions about the real essence of a "good education". Montaigne is famous for his condemnation of pedagogical dilly-dallying which results in extended adolescence.

"The boy we would breed … owes but the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life to education; the remainder is due to action. Let us, therefore, employ that short time in necessary instruction.

"Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift everything he reads, and lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust. … for, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own reason, they will no more be theirs, but become his own.

"After having taught him what will make him more wise and good, you may then entertain him with the elements of logic, physics, geometry, rhetoric, and the science which he shall then himself most incline to, his judgment being beforehand formed and fit to choose, he will quickly make his own." 

Education: Tradition and Innovation by Bob Love

Here we seek the perennial issues educators face to see how the ways they address them in different periods prove their underlying relationships to the unchanging processes of human cognition and action.