ABSTRACT
The powerful movement of educational questioning and reform which gathered increasing momentum throughout the seventeenth century came from two major sources: a new stream of theorizing generated by a number of individual thinkers, which came to maturity in the doctrine of empiricism; and the equally important if less spectacular growth of a new system of institutions of higher learning. Throughout the West education was still dominated by the traditional procedures inherited from medieval Christendom, and indeed the great reforming activities of the medieval and Reformation periods had been in no way aimed at demolishing the basically religious conception of the world and of human knowledge as expressed in the doctrines of the Catholic Church; it is a matter of record that submission to authority was always more frequent than defiance. Throughout the sixteenth century, however, while the great doctrinal and military battles raged throughout Europe, scholars became increasingly preoccupied with questioning the framework of explanation derived from scholastic Aristotelianism.
