From the Middle Ages to the Modern Age: an overview of social history and education of children

Abstract

This work will focus on the social history and on the education of children in the Middle Age and Modern Age. In its chapters it will be addressed the major aspects of educational development in these periods, school life, the birth of the schools, the emergence of school classes and their composition, the advancement of the discipline in these institutions, the family’s role in the individualization of the child and the school in the process of childhood’s formation and duration. In view of modernity as an unfinished stage of breaking with the medieval customs and values, but also characterized by the contradiction between the new ideals of freedom and an overbearing government, the main objective of this work is to present the consequences of these changes on education, particularly in the education of children. For this, it will be pointed out the central arguments of writers such as Franco Cambi (1999), Jacques Gelis (1994) and Philippe Aries (2005), which have studied these issues.