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Most work on the Enlightenment tends to emphasise what intellectuals wrote about what education should be and not about what education actually was during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is spite of the fact that leading educational theorists like England's John Locke and Switzerland's Jean Jacques Rousseau both emphasised the importance of shaping young minds early. By the late Enlightenment there was a rising demand for a more universal approach to education, particularly after the American and French Revolutions. Enlightenment children were taught to memorise facts through oral and graphic methods that originated during the Renaissance.[76] The predominant educational psychology from the 1750s onward, especially in northern European countries was associationism, the notion that the mind associates or dissociates ideas through repeated routines. In addition to being conducive to Enlightenment ideologies of liberty, self-determination and personal responsibility, it offered a practical theory of the mind that allowed teachers to transform longstanding forms of print and manuscript culture into effective graphic tools of learning for the lower and middle orders of society.[77] Many of the leading universities associated Enlightenment progressive principles were located in northern Europe, with the most renowned being the universities of Leiden, Göttingen, Halle, Montpellier, Uppsala and Edinburgh. These universities, especially Edinburgh, produced professors whose ideas had a significant impact on Britain's North American colonies and, later, the American Republic. Within the natural sciences Edinburgh's medical also led the way in chemistry, anatomy and pharmacology.[78] However, in general the universities and schools of France and most of Europe were bastions of traditionalism and were not hospitable to the Enlightenment. In France the major exception was the medical university at Montpellier.[79] |
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