to churches and monasteries. We have already seen (in Chapter 9) the crisis of
the universities which set in after 1300, as universities proliferated, enrollments
dropped, institutions failed, and the licensing monopolies over the professions
tended to break down. Especially in England and France, the core of the old
system, the universities, now shifted toward becoming collections of colleges,
that is to say, boarding schools for undergraduate students, taking away
instruction from the arts faculty. In the 1500s these university colleges began
to expand downward to incorporate the elementary Latin curriculum as well,
that is, taking over the territory of the lower grammar schools. Medieval
schools never had any strict age grading, and the colleges now had an age
range from 8 to 20. Most students were day students, who attended for only
a few years. The only remaining link to the old university structure was that
if a student did persevere all the way to the end of the course, he could take
the old M.A. degree; but the value of this credential was now disappearing.
The medieval two-tiered system was now divided along a different line: in-
stead of grammar schools and universities with teenagers and young adults
in the latter, there were now colleges and professional faculties, with the former
extending down to children (Ariès, 1962: 195–237; Simon, 1966; Grendler,
1989).
As many towns began to set up colleges independently of the universities,
the status advantage of university education disappeared. The Jesuits made
their success by pushing this tendency to an extreme. Their colleges were free
and open to all social classes; in the 1600s, 50 to 60 percent of students were
sons of artisans and the lower-middle class. Emphasis was still on Latin, the
old high-status language of the educated. Within this frame, the Jesuits made
a point of incorporating the newer culture offering science, literature, and the
latest modes of philosophy and of theological argumentation. We see another
significant overlap with Loyola’s presence at Paris in the 1530s: Ramus took
his M.A. there in 1536 and began teaching a reformed, non-Aristotelean logic,
mixing in Humanistic cultural capital by combining logic with rhetoric into a
single art of discourse. This became the model for textbooks in secondary
schools, spreading widely in the new Calvinist middle schools that grew up,
especially in Germany and England, as an alternative to the traditional univer-
sities. The Jesuit colleges too adopted a version of the Ramus textbooks, such
as the one Descartes studied at La Flèche (EP, 1967: 7:66–67). Here again we
find the Jesuits paralleling on the Catholic side the organizational reforms that
opened up with the collapse of the medieval system of religious education.
Educational reform provided the organizational basis for intellectual inno-
vation. The Jesuit college in Rome became a center for high-level scientists and
theologians from the 1560s through 1620, including Clavius, Suarez, and
Bellarmine, and connecting to Galileo (Wallace, 1984). Perhaps most strikingly,
578 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths