Education in 12th Century Medieval Times

In the 20th century, we spend the first 20 to 25 years in some kind of learning environment. People nowadays also have to be aware that it is becoming harder to get through life comfortably without getting a degree in college after high school. School is something that is a system in our everyday lives: everyone must do it or else have a difficult time providing for them and family. We take advantage of our right to be educated, but we do not like it all of the time. The 12th century had an entirely different story. Medieval students avidly sought out something that we today take for granted. Thinking about how different things were for the people of the medieval era, it is oft times hard to see the similarities between schools then and now.

Schools of the medieval era started off with churches educating their own people with basics, this grew to be removed from the church as the number of people wanting to get an education at the time grew larger than the church itself. The masters also became “irked by the restrictions of a local school.” The masters wanted more freedom and the small and constricted towns had too many disadvantages. These pressures “led to a fairly rapid disengagement of ‘higher studies’ from cathedrals,” and therefore the able masters would attempt to be more accessible to their students and have the ability to freely exercise their powers. The schools were able to evolve into our modern colleges. We also have the choice to go to a religious school or to a secular school to advance our learning.

For a short time, schools of the 12th century were deinstitutionalized and therefore out of control. Masters would find a place to teach wherever they could. The first half of the 12th century, there was a “wide ...

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... do not have to worry about whether we will be able to go to a certain school if the teacher travels or dies because the school will more than likely go on and replace that teacher with someone just as skilled. Teachers also have it easier now because they can make a living off of this career instead of finding something else that will pay them. Schools, students and masters of the 12th century had a much more difficult time since they began the history of education, but there are still similarities that remain between what went on then and what goes on now.

Works Cited

R. W. Southern, "The Schools of Paris and the School of Chartres," in Renaissance and Renewal in the 12th Century, ed. by Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 118.

Peter Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, trans. by Henry Adams Bellows (Medieval Sourcebook), chapter II.