fatal

Education
Formal education 1 consists of attending a
religious school until the human age of 14. If education
is pursued beyond religious school, it is continued
at a university.
Religious School
There are no public schools. The elite of
the city’s youth attend school, mostly the sons of
nobility and royalty. Education places them permanently
above peasants and ignorant serfs. In a religious
school, pupils sit on the floor, all ages together.
Instruction is predominantly oral. The schoolmaster
lectures, and students take notes on oblong
wooden tablets coated with black or green wax, using
a stylus of bone, ivory, or metal. The whitish
scratches it makes can be erased by rubbing with its
rounded end.
In drill, pupils repeat in chorus after the
teacher and continue repeating an exercise until they
have memorized it. Since books have to be copied
by hand and writing materials are expensive, memory
and oral exercises are indispensable. The schoolmaster
reads aloud. The attention of the students
does not wander, for each of them must recite tomorrow
part of what he has heard today. The lecture,
the main teaching session of the day, takes place
in the early afternoon. Following it, there is a period
of free discussion, then drill. The next morning
is devoted to the repetition.
Theoretically, the curriculum consists of the
7 liberal arts. But schools rarely teach all 7 of the
arts, and the emphasis is unequal. These arts are
liberal because their purpose is not money-making
and because they are worthy of a free man. There
are 7 mainly because characters are fond of the number
7, which is a numerological key to an ordered
universe. Liberal arts are divided into the trivium (3
roads) and quadrivium (4 roads). The trivium is comprised
of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The
quadrivium is comprised of the scientific: arithmetic,
geometry, astronomy, and music. Recent additions
have been the subjects of theology and philosophy.
The function of higher education has been absorbed
by the universities.
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The grammar of religious school embraces
not only linguistics but writing, spelling, composition,
speech, and general literature, including poetry
and history. In grammar, the student is exposed to
a series of authors. Anything written in a book has
a certain sacredness; all the established authors are
considered authorities. Some are surprisingly profane
and even erotic, but they are nevertheless studied
for their rhetorical artifices.
In geometry, the class studies a map of the
circular earth, composed of 3 continents equal in
size, separated by narrow bands of water.
University
Universities are closed to women, but they
are equally closed to men except those who are being
trained to be a barrister, doctor, or priest. At a
university, scholars break for lunch, meeting again
in the afternoon for another lecture or disputation.
When the day is over, scholars may turn to studying
or copying by candlelight, or since all forms of athletics
are prohibited, scholars may turn to gaming,
drinking, and whoring. Although human scholars
usually enter the university at 14 or 15, their private
lives are almost entirely unsupervised. There are no
university buildings. Classes are held in the masters’
houses. Student lodgings, schools, and brothels are
cheek by jowl, and sometimes masters and students
conduct disputations on the second floor, whores
and pimps on the first.
The favorite sport of university students is
fighting -- with each other, with the townspeople,
or with the provost’s guard.
After 6 years of studying, a student may face
the examiners. If the student passes the exams, then
he receives a license to teach. Otherwise, he may
become a scribe, or go on to study medicine or law.
Wandering scholars drift from one school
or one patron to another, passing their days in taverns
and living by their wits. Some contribute to
worthy literature.
1. Information on medieval education was referenced from Gies’ Life in a Medieval City. For more information, see the
References section at the end of this book.
Chapter 6: Sociality