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Pedagogical Thinking and the Renaissance

 

            The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are considered a time of transition entering the Middle Ages and the Modern Age.
             During the Renaissance, education continued with the structure of the medieval teaching, organized according to the needs of the Church to train clerics who had to know Latin. Overall, teaching was similar everywhere: the professor read and commented a manual and rarely went to any sources. Then, students were engaged in the discussion of the issues raised. In one classroom there were several teachers with different groups of students. To avoid this overlap, a distribution of students started, according to their level of knowledge, that with the passage of time resulted in the separation of students by age.
             Renaissance educators introduced the Greek higher education and replaced the Latin of the Church by the writers of the classical period, like Cicero and Virgil. However, they kept teaching in the arts faculties of the medieval Trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) and Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music). Arts faculties conferred the title of "master of arts" which allowed admission to the specialized schools in medicine, law or theology. Over time, the faculties of arts were transformed in schools, thus giving rise to the modern high school. At these schools, more numerous and more crowded, they attended some poor young bourgeois and working as servants-in the school itself or at the home of professors to attend the classes.
             It was a period of great inventions and discoveries in different fields: the invention of printing, the discovery of America, the establishment of a sea route to India. Humanists, representatives of the Renaissance, worshiped the man first, and fought tirelessly against religious worldview that subjugated personality. But progressive positions taken by them were applicable only to a limited circle of people: the highest layer of society.


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