Renaissance boys and girls attended a variety of different kinds of pre-university schools in England, France, Italy, and Spain. Renaissance Europe inherited from the Middle Ages a large educational establishment that was not a "school system" in a modern sense. Instead, there were different kinds of schools which complemented or overlapped each other. The many and confusing names for pre-university schools, such as song school, grammar school, and collège, further confuse matters.

Three major themes either have or ought to have affected the recent study of pre-university education in Germany between about 1400 and 1700. These are the Reformation and schooling; the so-called "new history" of education; and the current wave of research on literacy in Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter- Reformation Europe. The works cited should be considered illustrative of investigation carried out and issues debated during approximately the last twenty years.

Let me begin with a quotation: "The history of the universities was terra incognita until the early 1950s, inhabited only by pious hagiographers, myopic chroniclers, and that most dangerous of pre-historic animals, the historian of education. This latter creature . . . only seems to be concerned with gathering historical justifications for contemporary educational nostrums, or identifying the earliest instance of a pedagogic practice that meets with modern approbation" (Morgan, 142).

Let me pursue for a moment the question that Professor Nauert raised at the end of his paper: how successful were the new classical schools of the Renaissance in achieving the highest goal of the humanist educational program, that of inspiring their students to seek wisdom and virtue?

This is a difficult question for us to answer for two reasons. First, as a result of the deterioration of the tradition of moral philosophy in the west after the Enlightenment, the kind of deterioration that Alasdair Maclntyre describes in his well-known book After Virtue, our society is deeply confused about the meaning, purpose and possibility of moral education.