ABSTRACT

We have successively traced the two great educational movements which emerged in the sixteenth century. The first, represented by Rabelais, is characterised by a need to extend human nature in every direction but also and above all by an inordinate taste for erudition, by a thirst for knowledge which nothing can slake. The second movement, exemplified by Erasmus, lacks this scope and is not possessed of such lofty ambitions: on the contrary it reduces the whole principle of human culture to literary culture alone, and it makes the study of classical antiquity virtually the sole instrument of this culture. The art of speaking and writing here occupies the place reserved for knowledge in Rabelais’ educational thought. The essential goal of education was to be to train the pupil to appreciate the masterpieces of Greece and Rome and to imitate them intelligently. Thus the educational formalism, from which we seem about to be delivered with Rabelais and the great men of learning of the sixteenth century, with Erasmus reasserts its dominion over us in a new form. The grammatical formalism of the Carolingian era and the dialectical formalism of Scholasticism are now followed by a new kind of formalism: a literary formalism.