ABSTRACT
During the period, in spite of a political and military turmoil which largely yoked men's endeavours to the barest practicalities of life, a collection of cathedral schools came into existence, becoming in time the soil in which universities could grow. The rise of the universities belongs to a class of cultural moments in which a generation's dissatisfaction with the state of its intellectual inheritance led to a range of new achievements. Perhaps the most celebrated of them is the birth of 'science' among the Ionian Greeks of the sixth century. All children were now sent off to schools which taught a somewhat pragmatic compromise between useful knowledge and education. By and large, the academic element in education managed to survive only at the cost of imposing a good deal of pointless drudgery on the majority of pupils. This raises issues about the relation between the university and outside opinion.
