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The History of Education; educational practice and progress considered as a phase of the development and spread of western civilization by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley
page 285 of 1184 (24%)
were not infrequently called upon to pass upon questions of doctrine or
heresy. "Kings and princes," says Rashdall, in an excellent summary as to
the value and influence of the mediaeval university instruction (R. 124),
"found their statesmen and men of business in the universities, most
often, no doubt, among those trained in the practical science of Law."
Talleyrand is said to have asserted that "their theologians made the best
diplomats." For the first time since the downfall of Rome the
administration of human affairs was now placed once more in the hands of
educated men. By the interchange of students from all lands and their
hospitality, such as it was, to the stranger, the universities tended to
break down barriers and to prepare Europe for larger intercourse and for
more of a common life.

On the masses of the people, of course, they had little or no influence,
and could not have for centuries to come. Their greatest work, as has been
the case with universities ever since their foundation, was that of
drawing to their classrooms the brightest minds of the times, the most
capable and the most industrious, and out of this young raw material
training the leaders of the future in Church and State. Educationally, one
of their most important services was in creating a surplus of teachers in
the Arts who had to find a market for their abilities in the rising
secondary schools. These developed rapidly after 1200, and to these we owe
a somewhat more general diffusion of the little learning and the
intellectual training of the time. In preparing future leaders for State
and Church in law, theology, and teaching, the universities, though
sometimes opposed and their opinions ignored, nevertheless contributed
materially to the making and moulding of national history. The first great
result of their work in training leaders we see in the Renaissance
movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to which we next turn.
In this movement for a revival of the ancient learning, and the subsequent
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