Last updated 09/07/24: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
Throughout education's long history legends and myths that have been generated in misinformation and cultivated by indifference or incorrigible obstinacy have attached themselves to a core of historical knowledge to distort the dimensions of its accuracy. Some were transitory, were quickly dispelled, and had relatively little influence on the work or the thought of historians or schoolmasters; but others have defied the erosions of time and truth and have grown in stature to become part of the conventional educational tradition. Their validity goes unchallenged; it is simply and perhaps blindly accepted. Here we propose to plumb the authenticity of four myths of content that, despite their fictitious character, have achieved an almost unassailable status in the history of education and two myths of conception, by which we mean unreal expectations for or invalid interpretations of the role or the meaning of the history of education. The distinction between these two general types of myths will shortly become clearer, but here we can say that some myths deceive us on points of content, while others blur our conception of the nature and purpose of educational history.
1. This was Institutio Oratoria. Google Scholar
2. See Wilkins, A. S., Roman Education (New York, 1905), 20.Google Scholar
3. See Plato, Lusis 214B, and Freeman, K. J., Schools of Hellas (London, 1912), 42–78.Google Scholar
4. This was the traditional Greek paideia upon which Plato constructed his new philosophical system of education. He revised, transformed, and criticized these educational foundations, yet they remained, as he wanted them to, as a living heritage from older Greek paideia. See Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. by Gilbert Highet (New York, 1947), vol. II, 211–234.Google Scholar
5. See Walden, John W. H., The Universities of Ancient Greece (New York, 1909), 35–40.Google Scholar
6. See Barclay, William, Educational Ideals in the Ancient World (London, 1959), 238.Google Scholar
7. Tertullian, Apology 41.Google Scholar
8. See Jerome, Lives of Illustrious Men 36; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.10.Google Scholar
9. Rashdall, Hastings, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, edited by Powicke, F. M. and Emden, A. B. (Oxford, 1936), vol III, 442.Google Scholar
10. See Williams, John R., “Cathedral School of Rheims in the 11th Century,” Speculum XXIX (October, 1954), 661–677.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11. See Gabriel, Asztrik, Student Life in Ave Maria College, Mediaeval Paris (Notre Dame, Ind.), 1955.Google Scholar
12. See Mansbridge, Albert, The Older Universities of England (New York, 1923), 4–5; and Frank Pegues, “Royal Support of Students in the Thirteenth Century,” Speculum XXXI (July, 1956), 454–462.Google Scholar
13. See Boyd, William, History of Western Education, 6th ed. (London, 1952), 330–333.Google Scholar
14. Adamson, J. W., Pioneers of Modern Education (New York, 1905), 212.Google Scholar
