26
At rare and unpredictable moments a revolution-
reformation
sumptions that had previously held an assortment of
ary concept fundamentally changes the underlying asbeliefs together. This is known as a Paradigm Shift1,
a totally new mindset that reshapes relationships so
that nothing can ever be seen in the same way again.
Travellers in England early in the sixteenth century would have been impressed by the country’s apparent
prosperity, by the colourful nature of
its festivities as well as its beliefs in
hobgoblins, witches and fairies. Few
questioned the biblical teaching that
man’s present life on earth was simply a preparation for Eternity. Everything a person did would be weighed
up on the dreadful Day of Judgement;
it would either be upwards to heaven,
or downwards to the everlasting fires
of hell. As Christ had promised forgiveness of sins to those who truly repented the outcome on Judgement
Day was rather like Russian roulette
– providing you truly repented on
your deathbed (and gave away all your
wealth) then hopefully it didn’t matter just how many sins you had committed beforehand. The regular sinner,
however, feared that if death caught
him unawares, there would be no time
for forgiveness and, be he king or pauper, it was to the fires of hell that he
would be bound. Virtually everyone
believed that – it shaped their every
action.2
A perceptive visitor would have
found many critics of the ostentatious wealth of the Church, and they
would have heard some men questioning the doctrine that it was the clergy
64
who controlled the entry to heaven.
The Pope had recently licensed pardoners to sell Indulgences which the
gullible believed could release sinners
from punishment. This touched a particularly raw nerve in England where
thousands of copies of an Englishlanguage Bible were already in circulation. In these Bibles Englishmen
could see no theological justification
for buying salvation3. Salvation, as the
German monk in far off Wittenberg
was soon to argue, could come only
through faith. English society was still
devotedly Christian, but it was fast becoming anti-clerical.4
Living in today’s highly secular
world it’s hard to appreciate the quite
enormous influence the Church had
on all aspects of daily life five hundred years ago. The Church seemed an
impregnable institution, the nearest
thing ever seen to a super power ruled
over by a pope whose spiritual authority was supported by temporal powers
comparable in our day to those of the
Secretary General of the United Nations, the President of the World Bank,
the Chief Executive of the I.M.F. and
the financial resources of Microsoft, all
rolled into one person. To shout ‘heretic’ was to unleash the same civil powers of repression that an appeal to
‘national security’ does today.5
When copies of Luther’s Ninetyfive Theses first reached England they
created little interest – such things
had been said before. Henry, still the
epitome of a young, sophisticated and
dynamic Renaissance prince, was affronted, however, and wrote a lengthy
refutation of these in 1521 for which
the Pope honoured him with the title
of ‘Defender of the Faith’. Then within
five years it all changed. Henry was
frustrated that his Queen appeared incapable of giving him a male heir (in
the sixteenth century inheritance was
everything, and the biggest excuse for
war), and by now totally infatuated
with Anne Boleyn, who consistently
refused to sleep with him as his mistress6. Anne’s price was marriage, and
possibly a public endorsement of Protestantism. Marriage required Henry
to divorce Catherine. Such matters had
earlier been settled privately, if deviously, between monarchs and Pope
but, unfortunately for Henry, Pope
Clement had recently been taken prisoner by Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V.
A sexually tormented prince was
cornered, but was not to be frustrated.7 Demanding of Thomas Wolsey, his
Lord Chancellor, who was a Cardinal
and therefore answerable to the Pope,
that a way had to be found of gaining
him a legal separation from Catherine
even if that meant turning the legal
practices of England into a farce. Wolsey saw in Luther’s Ninety-five Theses
a ruse for denying the Pope’s power to
legislate against a temporal monarch.8
Initially it didn’t work; the Pope called
Henry’s bluff, and the once mighty
Wolsey was arrested on a charge of
treason and had the good fortune to
die before his trial. But the cat was
out of the bag. A mind-changing idea
in theology had found a specific context. A paradigm shift was occurring
that was to reshape Western civilisa-
tion. Nothing would ever be the same
again. The tipping point had simply
been a single broadsheet with ninetyfive theses, an early version of a modern-day blog.
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Reformation
27
a nation state
The Reformation was the beginning of the transformation of a society based on faith in authority, to a society based on the authority of the individual’s own faith
– from a society where there had been a high level of
faith in a central dogma to, after many a bloody struggle, a new form of community where the individual’s authority was based on the relevance of their own belief.1
In appropriating to himself the spiritual authority of the Pope, Henry
shattered the Christian cosmos that
had held together for fifteen hundred years. Once tasting that authority, Henry’s lust for further power
– as well as for the love of Anne Boleyn – (in which order it’s hard to say)
grew apace. He convinced himself that
all the bishops and clergy of England
should be subject to his spiritual as
well as temporal power. By May 1532
he had bludgeoned the clergy into accepting him as the Supreme Head of
the Church in England, and granting
him his divorce. Immediately Henry
married the heavily pregnant Anne
only to find his hopes dashed four
months later when the baby turned
out to be a girl, the Princess Elizabeth,
not the male successor he yearned for.
The couple tried again, and three years
later Anne tragically gave birth to a
still-born boy. Henry turned his rage
onto the woman for whom he had sacrificed the Catholic Church in England,
and ordered that she be beheaded.2
Henry’s blood was up; faced with a
possible invasion from Catholic Europe he needed money for his army. If
he were already Supreme Head of the
Church was he not also the owner of
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its enormous riches – its lands, building, and its quite enormous investments? Here Henry turned to one of
the nastiest characters in English history and appointed Thomas Cromwell as his chancellor. On the rumour
that three abbots had dared to criticize
Henry from their pulpits they were
arrested, found guilty, and summarily
executed. Clerical opposition collapsed
completely. In five years all the monasteries of England were dissolved, including all the schools that had been
set up over such long periods of time
to provide England with an educated
middle class3.
The King seized the portable treasures of the monasteries, burnt many
of their libraries, sold off their lands
and stripped down their magnificent
buildings, and sold off their stone,
lead, and timber to be recycled to build
comfortable homes for the newly rich.
The total number of monks, nuns and
clerics who were displaced amounted
to just over one percent of the total
population. It’s of perhaps more than
passing interest to note that, in terms
of 2006, this would be the equivalent of turning onto the streets all the
teachers in primary and secondary
schools together with all the lecturers
at the universities, and then selling off
the land as future hyper-markets or
retail parks, a useful visual indication
of the scale of the paradigm shift. In
little more than twenty years – a generation – Henry’s need to produce a
male heir became the context in which
Luther’s attack on the Church found
its champion, and Machiavelli’s4 advice (see Introduction) led to the creation of the first genuine nation state
in England. In the cruel turbulence of
a Tudor dynastic struggle a new world
was painfully born5.
Yet when Henry died in 1547 his
was a lavish, catholic funeral. Henry
might have reformulated the relationship between the monarchy and
the Pope but, at that stage, protestant
England certainly was not. It was in
the six years that followed when the
young King Edward (only legitimate
surviving son of Henry Viii by Jane
Seymour)6, initially under the guardianship of the overtly protestant Archbishop Cranmer, and his uncle Edward
Seymour, Duke of Somerset, that England was transformed into a protestant
country. Protestant lawyers and clergy
started to come out of the woodwork
in which they had been burrowing
since the time of Wycliffe. Those chanteries that had not been suppressed
alongside the monasteries were seized
in 1550 and at least some of their
wealth used to endow a string of new
grammar schools. Cranmer’s Prayer
Book of 1552 created a complete Protestant liturgy, in which is to be found
some of the finest prose in the English
language7; “Oh God, from whom all
holy desires, all good councils, and all
just works do proceed; give unto thy
servants that peace which the world
cannot give”. Peace was not to come
for a very long time, as Englishmen
tried to work out just what it was they
now believed.
At the age of sixteen Edward sud-
denly died of a fever. The Catholic
Mary became queen and vowed to return England fully to the Catholic
faith8. Some three hundred men and
women were sent to the stake, including Archbishop Cranmer. Then Mary,
having had two phantom pregnancies, died of cervical cancer in 1558. To
an unstable throne came the princess
Elizabeth9, at twenty-four years of age
already a proven survivor determined
to find a ‘via media’ (a middle way).
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A Nation State
28
origins of
modern
education
In recent years it has been said ruefully that the English
naturally excel in invention, the Japanese in manufacturing and the Americans in salesmanship. Why are the
English like this? It seems it all goes back to the Reformation, to the very first book ever written in England
about education, which argued that as a student could
learn more in an hour from a book, than in twenty
hours of experience, practical subjects were of no value1.
Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries left England with a sudden shortage of schools, just at the time when
the commercial interests of the country called for larger numbers of educated young men. Edward diverted
some of the monies from the suppression of the chanteries to the creation of some new (Edward Sixth) free
grammar schools, while wealthy merchants and others early in Elizabeth’s
reign, no longer able to endow a chantery in their name, turned instead
to endowing grammar schools2. But
what, and how, should such schools
now teach, for the Reformation had
fundamentally changed the way Protestants thought about authority?
Which meant that people had to be
taught to think for themselves. That
in turn challenged the traditional role
of priests and teachers who had to become, in modern jargon, more like facilitators than instructors.
Men wanted to hold onto as many
of the older traditions as possible, and
one such was the Rev. Thomas Alleyne, rector of Stevenage, who bequeathed money to found three
grammar schools when he died in
68
1558. He was in no doubt that it was to
be ‘more of the same’, by ordering that
‘in their communications all pupils
shall be in Latine in all places among
themselves as well as in the streets and
in their playes as in schole’.
Ten years later the fifty-three year
old Roger Ascham3 published what
was to become the most important
education book of its time, and of
subsequent centuries, namely “The Scholemaster”. Ascham wrote this, significantly, in English not Latin. He has
to be taken seriously. In his day he
was revered as an outstanding scholar
and, in 1548, when Princess Elizabeth
was fourteen years old, he became
her tutor. Ascham was conventional
in the priority which he placed on the
study of the classics – both literature
and language – but unconventional
in the emphasis he placed on ‘gentleness’ in instruction especially in the
early years. He urged the cultivation
of ‘hard wits’, rather than superficial
‘quick wits’, which he defined as those
who could memorise answers but not
work things out for themselves. That
was a fundamental challenge to the
pre-reformation system of schooling.
Intellectually rigorous with students,
he was humane and harshly criticised
the brutality of much grammar school
teaching (‘the butchery fear of making Latin’s’), the foolish discrimination against the slow-witted child, and
the habit of sending young men to Italy to acquire personal experience of
Renaissance art and literature. The
schoolmaster must study each individual pupil, he wrote, and ‘discretely
consider the right disposition of both
their natures, and not so much weigh
what either of them is able to do now,
as what either of them is likely to do
hereafter’. Quick wits are deceiving,
Ascham wrote, for “I know that those
which be commonly the wisest, the
best learned, and best men also, when
they be old, were never commonly
the quickest of wits when they were
young”4.
Which all testifies to Ascham’s
greatness. But he added a third precept, and it is this which has had such
a devastating effect on English education. In the attainment of wisdom
Ascham was convinced that learning
from a book, or from a teacher, was
twenty times as effective as learning
from experience. He added what seems
the rather trite statement that “It was
an unhappy mariner who learnt his
craft from many shipwrecks”. Then he
went on to say that it was folly for a
young man to travel to Italy in search
of the wisdom of the ancients, said Ascham. Why such a trenchant injunction? “I was once in Italy myself”, he
wrote, “but I thanked God that my
abode there was but nine days”. This
scholar from damp and temperate
England where no men, and certainly
no women, ever took their clothes off
in public, was appalled by the lasciviousness of the statutes, the writings
and the paintings that archaeologists
were recovering from the dust of ancient Rome, and the fascination these
held for lecherous sixteenth century
men. “I saw in that little time, in one
city, more liberty to sin than ever I
heard in our noble city of London in
nine years”5.
So, concluded Ascham, let the
schoolmaster censor what it is that
students study. Classical literature
contains all that is best in philosophy and greatest in human achievement but, and here was the voice of
that very particular English manifestation of Protestantism — the Puritans — beginning to make itself heard
by repeating, ever more vigorously,
St. Paul’s diatribe against women as
the temptresses of honourable men.
“Why can’t a woman be more like a
man?” was to men like Ascham a very
real sentiment6. Protestantism was to
do much to release human creativity,
but it was to take far longer for Protestants and the English Puritans in particular, to accept their sexuality.
69
Origins of Modern
Education
29
elizabethan
education
There is in education a law of delayed action, by which
seed sown and long forgotten only grows in late years.
Teachers like to see results from their efforts, and direct
them accordingly, but the most precious fruits of a good
teacher’s work are those that he is never likely to see.1
If the quality of teachers can best be
seen by studying their students then
Queen Elizabeth is splendid testimony
to Roger Ascham2. Elizabeth had almost everything against her in her
youth. Her mother was executed, on
her father’s orders, when she was less
than three. She had several illegitimate siblings (one even by her own
aunt). Her first stepmother, Jane Seymour3, of whom she was very fond,
died a few days after her brother Edward was born, and another was
executed for adultery. Her third stepmother, Catherine Parr4, with whom
she lived after her father died, quickly
married a well-born charismatic adventurer, Thomas Seymour5. Seymour
appears to have had something more
than a stepfather’s interest in the fourteen-year-old princess, and Catherine,
sensing that Elizabeth’s teenage emotions were getting dangerously confused, banished Elizabeth from her
home6. Elizabeth was mortified, all the
more so when Catherine died shortly
afterwards in childbirth. Two years
later Seymour was executed for treason, and Elizabeth’s other guardian,
Archbishop Cranmer, was burnt at the
stake7. For five years Elizabeth was
in daily threat of execution from her
Catholic stepsister, Mary8.
Few emotionally traumatised children today go through as much mental anguish as did the young Elizabeth.
70
Yet Elizabeth emerged from all this as
one of the most cultured women of her
age, speaking six languages, responding at a reception in 1562 in ‘Italian to
one, French to the other, Latin to the
third; easily, without hesitation, clearly
and without being confused at the various subjects thrown out, as is usual in
such discussion’9. A woman who had
every reason to be totally screwed up,
most certainly was not.
Elizabeth must have inherited
some genetic advantages from her
two strong-minded parents, but also
she had from the very start an adoring nurse, Catherine Asher10, who was
to take the place of the mother Elizabeth never knew. A warm-hearted
woman who had entertained romantic
fantasies for her ward, she was forever
aware of the dangerous intrigues that
surrounded the princess. When Asher
was imprisoned in the Tower of London, as much to frighten the young
princess into making an admission
(however false) that would implicate
her and others, the sixteen-year-old
Elizabeth had the audacity to plead for
her nurse’s release with the very Lord
Protectorate11, who was after her own
blood, with the most perceptive and affectionate words; “We are more bound
to those that bringeth us up well than
to our parents, for our parents do that
which is natural for them – that is
bringing us into this world – but our
bringers-up are a cause to make us live
well”12.
Only in the early twenty-first century are female historians and neuropsychologists beginning to draw out of
the dusty archives of history the full
significance of mother, and mother
substitutes, in the first few months of
life on the lives of subsequently famous people. Far from being spoilt,
Elizabeth was left to entertain herself.
She read widely. When Ascham followed Grindal as her tutor in 1558 he
was so amazed at the quality of Elizabeth’s written Greek that he doubted
if there were three or four men in the
whole of England who could better
her. To her classical erudition Ascham
gave her a delight in the cadences of
the English language. Years later, in
1588, as Elizabeth rallied her troops
at Tilbury to repel the Armada, she
poured out the sum of all that erudition in words that recalled the Greeks,
Demosthenes and Aeschines, that she
had studied with the gentle Ascham;
“Let tyrants fear… being resolved in
the midst and heat of battle to live and
die amongst you all… I know I have
the body of a weak and feeble woman,
but I have the heart and stomach of a
king, and a King of England too”13.
Ascham well understood the development of the intellect, and England owes him much for the education
he provided for one of the country’s
greatest monarchs, but in his generalisation about separating learning from
experience, something which frightened his schoolmasterly mind because
it was uncontrollable and unquantifiable, he did subsequent generations a
great disservice14.
The many generations of schoolmasters who subsequently read Ascham, the majority of whom would
have been bachelors, took his injunction about the superiority of book
learning most literally. They trou-
bled themselves only with what Ascham had said, but never stopped to
ask why he had said it. So they continued to teach about the superiority of
men over women, of logic over emotions, and of the mind over the hand
to such an extent as to make the formal curriculum of the grammar school
increasingly irrelevant to the needs of
its pupils. The implications have often
been disastrous.
71
Elizabethan
Education
30
man for all
seasons
Children need to learn to think, to make connections, to work together, to take risks, to discover their
own talents. They need to read about all kinds of
things and explore different media. They need a curriculum that is broad, balanced and differentiated.1
Born in 1564, and so thirty years
older than his Queen, the young William Shakespeare was eight when he
was admitted to the recently formed
Edward VI Grammar School2 in his
home town of Stratford-on-Avon. This
was just two years after the publication of Ascham’s “The Scholemaster”.
Stratford was a typical market town
of some two thousand people – small
enough for most people to know each
other’s business. The young William
was one of nature’s survivors; usually
twenty percent of babies died within
a year of their birth, while some two
hundred and thirty-seven people died
of the plague in Stratford that year.
Shakespeare’s father, John, was a relatively prosperous glove maker (of
which there were twenty-three in the
town) who had several other interests:
he had a share in a farm, he bought
and sold wool and barley, he brewed
beer and he was a money lender. Astute businessman as he was, John
Shakespeare could not actually read3.
William’s mother, Mary4, came from
a respectable family of working farmers with pretensions to gentility. We
know her to have been dependable,
practical, intelligent, quick-witted,
and a good manager of the household.
That household included John’s workshop in which two apprentices worked,
and to which came the customers. John
prospered and by the time William
72
was four his father had been elected
mayor, and his little son would have
been expected to sit with his parents
in the front pew of the parish church
every Sunday listening to the vigorous language of the Bible as recently
translated into English.
William was inquisitive, energetic,
and exuberant, and had inherited his
mother’s quickness. It seemed that he
knew all the fields, woodlands and rivers within a day’s walk of his home.
Later in his plays and poetry Shakespeare lists no fewer than sixty species
of birds, and a remarkable hundred and
eighty different plants5. He knew the
significant characteristics of the seasons, the nature of floods, storms, sunshine and the light of the moon. He
knew the techniques of many craftsmen and from his father’s apprentices he learnt different ways of curing
leather. By the age of eight his mastery
of spoken and written English was sufficient for him to have been one of the
five or six boys admitted that year to
the grammar school where he would
have learnt, over the next five years,
to conjugate Latin verbs and to decline
nouns, and the eight parts of speech6.
Having mastered sentence construction, and the rigorous art of paraphrasing, he would have moved on to the
study of Aesop’s Fables and then to
the writings of Ovid, Seneca and Juvenal7. He probably studied the dia-
ries of Julius Caesar in the same way
as had St. Patrick a thousand years before, and still did English grammar
school boys almost 300 years later in
the 1950s8. Of mathematics, history
or any of the sciences there was simply none in the curriculum, but William – as with many thousands of his
contemporaries – knew much about all
such topics for they were the stuff of
everyday conversation in the challenging, unquestioning world of craftsmen
and apprentice that made up such a vibrant market town. In later years was
William, by then a well-known playwright, describing himself as he wrote
of the adolescent with “boiled brains”,
interested in nothing but “getting
wench with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting”?
If England had invented Ofsted (The
Office for Standards in Education)9
four hundred years before, a government inspector would have had to conclude that Shakespeare had indeed
experienced ‘a full, broad, balanced and
exceptionally well differentiated’ curriculum. Nevertheless, he would have
been forced to admit that this was primarily due to the multiple challenges
and excitement of living within a community where children mattered,
where there was a culture of voice not
print, and where all the facets of every
day life were visible. Schooling simply supplemented the youngster’s personal experience; it created a structure
for mental development, but it certainly did not suffocate the youngster’s sense for working things out for
themselves.
A twenty-first century inspector might have concluded that Shakespeare’s school teachers, Simon Hunt
and Thomas Jenkins, were too tied to
an old-fashioned pedagogy, were not
conversant enough with the affairs of
the world, and maybe too ‘academic’
in their approach to the emerging
needs of the seventeenth century. Despite such a theoretical dismissal, this
young student who preferred chasing
deer and exploring the greenwood and
who died at the comparatively early
age of fifty-two in 1616, became the
greatest playwright the world has ever
known. He didn’t, as Mark Twain10 was
later to write in The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, ever let his schooling get him down.
73
Man for all
Seasons