Imitation pedagogy and ethical indoctrination

Abstract

Sixteenth-century English humanist educators claimed that their educational programs prepared students for civic life by providing not just technical training in language use, but a more important ethical and moral training. The present discussion is to examine this claim, particularly as it applies to the question of what might have been the role of imitation exercises informing students' ethical character. When one considers imitation pedagogy in the general context of humanist education and in the particular context of the reading method prescribed by Erasmus, one finds that such exercises served not only as means by which student writers might assimilate the characteristic style and habits of thinking of the models they choose, but, in fact, such exercises were tools for students' ethical indoctrination. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine question whether humanist educators actually could have made good their claim to provide moral training or preparation for civic life (122). Examining the evidence available for the practices of humanist teachers, Grafton and Jardine contend that humanist education at its best was little more than training in Latin language skills. In support of their contention, Grafton and Jardine discuss the early fifteenth-century teaching practices of Guarino Guarini of Verona and the lectures of later Roman and Florentine rhetoricians, such as Buonaccorso Massari. By examining students' notes from such lectures, Grafton and Jardine conclude that the approach of these humanists to the classical texts was so unstructured and fraught with philological detail that students could not have been prepared by such education to confront larger questions concerning the attitudes and beliefs [which inform an entire text] either to endorse them, or to challenge them (58-67). To consider Grafton and Jardine's question as it applies to sixteenth-century English humanist educators' use of imitation pedagogy, one must first recall how the political conditions and religious strife of the English Renaissance affected the sort of education the English humanists advocated. Political and religious indoctrination became important aspects of sixteenth-century English humanist education even while such education retained the characteristic rhetorical nature of earlier Renaissance humanist education. According to William Bouwsma, early Renaissance Italian humanism was characterized by an emphasis on rhetoric, a cultural relativism, and an intellectual rejection of older conceptions of order, or cosmos. But northern European Renaissance culture of 1450 onwards was characteristically inclined to reassert intellectual order and authority as political, religious, and cultural forces of order (particularly the monarchies and the papacy) reasserted their power (422-431). In England, the Tudor monarchy began to assert first its political authority and later, with Henry VIII's break with Rome, its religious authority. Grafton and Jardine explain that at the same time it was left for northern European humanist educators, particularly Erasmus, to make humanism practicable in the classroom, to change philological method into pedagogical method. Fifteenth-century Italian humanists at Rome and Florence had lectured brilliantly, elucidating by philological method obscure classical texts