Latin school
Latin schools aimed to prepare students for university, as well as seeking to enable those of middle-class status to rise above their station.
[5] Most boys began at the age of seven but older men who wanted to study were not discouraged as long as they could pay the fees.
[6] Students usually finished their schooling during their late teens, but those who desired to join the priesthood had to wait until they were twenty-four in order to get accepted.
[9] As Europeans experienced the intellectual, political, economic and social innovations of the Renaissance so did their attitudes towards Medieval Latin schools.
[11] Humanist ideas became so influential that residents in Italian states began to call for a new kind of education in Latin.
[12] It created an opportunity to advance an individual's social status since more institutions intellectual, political and economic sought workers who possessed a background in classical Latin as well as training in humanistic scripts.
[8] In some areas in Spain during the late 15th century, the church encouraged priests and sacristans to train others in reading and writing.
Jesuits founded their own schools and offered free training in Latin grammar, Philosophy, Theology, Geography, Religious Doctrine and History for boys.
New students generally started off with easy basic grammar, and steadily moved into harder Latin readings such as the Donatus (Ars Minor stage), which was a syntax manual that was memorized, or even more advanced with glossaries and dictionaries.
[22] Similarly, as the student advanced into the Ars Dictaminis stage more theory and practice writing formal or prose letters were focused on.
[25] The revised Ars Dictaminis took its guidelines from one of Cicero's works, the de inventione and pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium.
There were five main parts: the salutatio (salutation), benevolentiae (winning the agreement of the recipient through the arrangement of words), narratio (the point of the discussion), petitio (petition), and conclusio (conclusion).
[12] In order to be able to move forward academically, a firm foundation in Studia Humanitatis starting from elementary school was necessary.
[16] Those who did study under this discipline were taught classical literature, history, rhetoric, dialectic, natural philosophy, arithmetic, some medieval texts, Greek as well as modern foreign languages.
Learning the classics and other subjects in this curriculum enabled the individual to speak, argue and write with eloquence and relevance.
[1] University was the final stage of academic learning and within its walls Latin was the language of lectures and scholarly debates.
[3] Jews however, including those who were converted into Christianity, were not allowed to teach so they developed their own schools which taught Doctrine, Hebrew and Latin.
The challenge to the Latin, Greek and "classical" domination of education came earlier than in Europe, but the tradition continued at a diminished level through the 20th century and into the 21st.
