ABSTRACT
The major educational development was, however, the monasteries. St Benedict founded the monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy and established the Benedictine monastic rule. The monasteries were, however, by no means the only providers of schools. The teacher in a cathedral school, as in a monastic school, was as much concerned with discipline and moral development as with academic achievement. The school at Aachen became what would be called a university, as it was devoted to higher levels of learning. Muslim scholars have correctly been given credit for preserving and developing the classical heritage of Greece and Rome. 'Scholasticism' is the term used by later historians to describe the dominant approach to education between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries. The pedagogy of scholasticism was based on the study of authoritative texts as well as mastery of the techniques of formal logic. In this way any inconsistencies could be argued away.
