We may regard with admiration the great intellectual achievements of the Scholastic philosophy which, for over two centuries, dominated the official education, but we must not forget that its ascendancy implied the exclusion from all public recognition of the local and national thought and literature which now, as before, was struggling into life.  The Troubadours and the Minnesaenger, the Chanson de Roland and the Nibelungenlied, the Chronicles of Froissard, Chaucer, and Piers Plowman, each of them so full of fresh vigorous local life, were not only outside the official system of education, but in their essence opposed to it.  This was clearly seen as soon as the free and uncontrolled mind was directed to the highest subjects of thought.  National idiosyncrasies, as they found expression in the domain of philosophy and theology, produced results different from the established teaching of the school.  To the Church truth was always one and the same.  Truth was one, error was manifold; in unity was salvation, and divergence was heresy.  And so every attempt at national and local thought was not only suppressed in education, but fell under the ban of discipline.  In Languedoc the Albigenses ventured the assertion of their independence; Huss in Bohemia, in England Wyclif.  What happened?  The Albigenses were massacred, Huss was burnt, Wyclif was condemned, and his followers suffered under the new law of heresy.

This system, which had originated as a part of a great spiritual movement, long outlived its usefulness.  It became an intolerable tyranny.  Its effects were to be seen in the teaching of the humblest grammar school, and every boy who began the study of the Latin grammar was being initiated into the abstractions or the Scholastic logic.  It became a dead and iron crust by which the mind of man was confined, and it was the school and the university which were the peculiar institutions by which this system was maintained.  Unity of education there was, but at what a price had it been won.

One thing had, however, been secured:  the common Christian basis of our modern civilization had been stamped upon the peoples; so long as Europe remains Europe this cannot be forgotten or obliterated.  No nation can repudiate its own past, and, whether they will or no, all Western nations are irrevocably bound together by the ties of the home in which their childhood and youth was passed.

At last the change came:  it came in that double revolution which we call the Renaissance and the Reformation.  In considering them we must confine ourselves as closely as we can to their effect on education.