History of European universities
Their purposes included training professionals, scientific investigation, improving society, and teaching critical thinking and research.
Moreover, until the end of the 19th century, religion exerted a significant, limiting influence upon academic curricula and research, by when the German university model had become the world standard.
[7] The rediscovery of ancient Græco–Roman knowledge (e.g. Aristotle's works and Roman law), led to the development of universitates (student guilds), and thus the establishment of the university in the contemporary sense.
[8] In turn, the traditional medieval universities — evolved from Catholic church schools — then established specialized academic structures for properly educating greater numbers of students as professionals.
[10] Hence, academic research was effected in furtherance of scientific investigation,[11] because science had become essential to university curricula via "openness to novelty" in the search for the means to control nature to benefit civil society.
[18] To achieve that, the curriculum comprised the liberal arts trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic), and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music) meant to prepare students for further specialized education in either theology, law, or medicine.
[19] In 1492, the socio-political consequences of the discovery of the New World expanded European university curricula, as human rights and international law became contemporarily relevant matters.
It is worth pointing out, that Christopher Columbus's letter to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain describing the native Taíno, he remarks that "They ought to make good and skilled servants"[22] and "these people are very simple in war-like matters...
[23] The Catholic Monarchs rejected Columbus' enthusiasm for the slave trade, issuing a decree in 1500 that specifically forbade the enslavement of indigenous people.
[26] Moving into the 19th century, the objective of universities evolved from teaching the "regurgitation of knowledge" to "encourag[ing] productive thinking.
Both have been connected with the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, the rise of the bourgeoisie during industrialization and the decline of classical medieval Scholasticism but used rather different approaches.
The specific German Bildungsbürgertum, which emerged starting in the mid-18th century with an educational ideal based on idealistic values and classical antiquity,[28][29] had failed in gaining political power and in its aims for a nationalist movement.
The Bildungsbürger turned to education as a means to construct a common national culture and strived for freedom against the nobility in power.
[30] Wilhelm von Humboldt was appointed Geheimer Staatsrat (not minister as intended) of education in 1809 and held office for just one year.
Based on Friedrich Schleiermacher's and his own liberal ideas, the goal was to demonstrate the process of the discovery of knowledge and to teach students to "take account of fundamental laws of science in all their thinking".
[32] Humboldt envisioned the university education as a student-centered activity of research: Just as primary instruction makes the teacher possible, so he renders himself dispensable through schooling at the secondary level.
During the 18th century, most universities were strongly connected to either a Catholic or a Protestant church, thus the professors’ and the students’ religion determined employment and matriculation.
[57] In the Americas, first the Spanish, then the British, and then the French founded universities in the lands they had conquered early in the 16th century,[61] meant to professionally educate their colonists and propagate monotheistic religion, like christianity, to establish formal, administrative rule of their American colonies; like-wise, the British in Canada, Australia, and the Cape Colony.
Those universities disseminated Western European science and technology and trained the local population (foremost the local elite) to develop their countries resources;[62] and, although most promoted the social, political, economic, and cultural aims of the imperial rulers, some promoted revolutionary development of the colonial societies.
