From the sources 8: Guibert de Nogent’s schooldays and timeless insights into good pedagogy

 

A much later (early fourteenth century?) satirical image of a medieval schoolroom featuring monkeys!

So when we last left Guibert, he was seven-years-old or thereabouts (he doesn’t specify his age) and struggling to learn the basics of Latin grammar – all those declensions and conjugations back in the days before you had all those handy noun and verb tables to memorise and Kennedy’s Latin Primer, the Cambridge Latin Course or whatever textbook you think is best for beginners (though nowadays very few people start learning as young as Guibert did). Now Guibert seems to have reflected a lot on what his education was like and the difficulties that came with learning and memorising a new language. In the process he came up with some ideas that felt uncannily familiar when I was reading just a few weeks ago – like the theories of cognitive neuroscience we covered as part of our learning and memory sessions in September for the PGCE.

Now I must admit here that I will be engaging in a certain degree of anachronism in my reading of Guibert, which some medievalist scholars would find immediately off-putting. Obviously, psychology as an academic discipline didn’t exist in the early twelfth century, nor would it until more than 750 years after Guibert’s death, and so Guibert would not have used the terms I will be using to refer to what he was describing. If a time-travelling cognitive neuroscientist were able to have a conversation with Guibert, it would take a long time before they could reach some mutual comprehension, since all the technical language of modern psychology would be completely alien to him. Even then, this hinges on the whole meta-question of how mentally similar were medieval people to us. This is an issue that is super-divisive to medievalists, who basically fall somewhere along a spectrum on this. At one end of the spectrum, you have those who think medieval people were basically people exactly like us – they just had swords, horses, heavy-ploughs, parchment and candles rather than automatic firearms, cars, combine-harvesters, laptops and electrical lighting. At the other end of the spectrum, you have medievalists who argue that medieval people were so mentally different from us that they might as well be Martian visitors – according to them, medieval people were incapable of thinking rationally like we do except according to their own weird logic, and their worldview is incomprehensible unless understood completely in its own terms. Both extremes in my view are unhelpful – the first is essentially the costume drama version of history. The latter is basically a postmodern repackaging of old stereotypes about medieval people as violent, uncouth, superstitious, prejudiced and lacking in individuality. Most medievalists, including myself, however, sensibly fall somewhere in the middle. And Guibert I feel nicely illustrates that. All his talk of sin, demons and God’s providence feels very alien to us and very evocative of the culture of twelfth century France, which was indeed very different to that of twenty-first century Britain. But strip those layers of paint away, and one can see a deeply insecure but highly intelligent mind trying to make sense of his own abnormal life experiences and the rapidly changing world around him.

But let’s get back to the classroom with Guibert. Guibert was, as we established in the previous post, in a class all by himself. He was taught by a private tutor called Solomon who, as we saw last time, had received his own education quite late in life (how late exactly we don’t know) and was probably not a very competent teacher – Guibert perhaps exaggerates this somewhat; indeed, as both Paul Archambault and Jay Rubinstein note, Solomon is deliberately made out by Guibert to be a negative inversion of the ideal schoolmaster described by the first century AD Roman educator Quintilian. Guibert makes it very clear to his readers that his school days were an unhappy time for him.

For starters, Guibert was placed under the complete authority of his tutor, who essentially controlled his upbringing and daily schedule from then on. This was not uncommon for that time. Peter Abelard (1079 – 1142) was given the same kind of power over Heloise when her uncle, Fulbert, hired him to be her private tutor and, because he already had a crush on her, he accepted the contract for this very reason. This one of the reasons why a lot of twenty-first century readers of Abelard and Heloise’s story find it less romantic and more creepy. What this kind of arrangement meant for Guibert was that he couldn’t live the same lifestyle as the other children growing up at his family castle. Guibert recounts that:

I wasn’t even allowed to play the usual games. I couldn’t go anywhere without his permission, couldn’t eat outside the house, couldn’t accept a gift from anybody without his consent. I couldn’t do anything “intemperate”, whether in thought, word, or deed. He seemed to expect me to behave more like a monk than a cleric. The other boys of my age could come and go as they pleased and, at times, with no constraints at all. I, on the other hand, was scrupulously guarded from such behaviour. I would sit in my cleric’s garb and watch the squads of players like a trained animal. Even on Sundays and saints’ feast days I had to put up with the constraints of this scholastic system. There was not a day, not a moment, when I was allowed a holiday. It was study, study, study all the time. Besides, when he had accepted my tutorship, my master was not allowed to take on any other student.

Guibert was thus, from the age of seven or possibly even six, allowed no school holidays, no play-time and no friends. For the time, that was weird enough, and nowadays child protection agencies would doubtless get involved. And in Guibert’s estimation, all of this relentless studying was all for naught, because Solomon was an awful teacher – a stern disciplinarian, yet completely incompetent when it came to his own subject knowledge (Latin language and literature). Guibert relates:

Because he worked me so hard everybody who watched us was convinced that with so much perseverance he would considerably sharpen my fledgling mind. Alas! This didn’t happen. My master was completely ignorant of the techniques of composition or metrics. Meanwhile I was deluged everyday with a hail of blows and whippings. This man was trying to force me to learn what he couldn’t teach!

Guibert’s brilliant sense of irony really does become apparent here! Now, if we measure Solomon up to the areas of professional learning used by my PGCE programme to assess student teachers like myself, Solomon would be strong (indeed, too strong) on behaviour management, but incredibly weak on pedagogy, curriculum, assessment and professional behaviours. Back in the eleventh century there weren’t really any teacher training programmes, but today Solomon definitely wouldn’t be awarded Qualified Teacher Status. And his use of punishments, seen as unnecessarily severe by eleventh century standards, would be regarded today as professional misconduct/ child abuse. So, by the standards of the time, Solomon was frankly not worth the money, and by the standards of the present, he would be barred from the teaching profession.

This being said, Guibert’s view of Solomon isn’t entirely negative. On the contrary, he says that he taught him “everything pertaining to modesty, chastity and good manners.” So at least he got something out of his education, but not what his mother paid for.

Guibert reflects quite deeply on this, and in the process comes up with some theories of how the education of children should work.

Any person’s nature, let alone a child’s, ends up being blunted if it has to submit to too much intellectual work. The more a mind is fired up by extended study, the more the spirit cools as the energies become overexerted. Energy dissolves into apathy.

How cognitive neuroscientists think memory works

What Guibert is describing here sounds a lot like what neuroscientists and educational theorists call “cognitive overload.” The theory of cognitive overload is essentially that new information has to be processed through the brain’s working memory before it can be committed to the long-term memory. The working memory can typically only process seven things at a time. Giving too much information to students at any one stage in the lesson, or getting them to do too many tasks, leads to cognitive overload as there’s just too much information for them to process. Therefore, what’s recommended to trainee teachers like myself is to chunk knowledge and tasks between different stages of the lesson/ different lessons to make it more manageable and easier to take in. Unnecessary or distracting information, meanwhile, gets cut out and scaffolds for complex tasks like prompts, instructions broken down into stages, templates, tables and other tools are provided so that not too much mental effort has to be made at any one time. Most people see cognitive load as cutting-edge educational theory, but Guibert was already thinking about this in the early twelfth century. Guibert then writes:

If, as Scripture puts it, “there was silence in heaven for half an hour [Revelation 8:1],” even the gift of contemplation cannot be sustained unceasingly. It is the same thing for any activity of the mind: it cannot be maintained without interruption. It is my belief, then, that any mind concentrating on a specific object should use varying degrees of attention. Alternately thinking about one thing, then another, we should be able to come back to the one that our mind is most interested in, as if renewed by the recreation we have given ourselves. Nature, too, tends to get tired and should find its remedy in a variety of activities. We must remember that God did not create a uniform world but allowed us to enjoy time changes – days and nights, spring and summer, autumn and winter. People who call themselves schoolteachers should find ways of varying the education of children and young people. Even students who have the seriousness of old people about them should not be treated any differently, in my opinion.

In a sense, what Guibert is recommending here is now enshrined in the modern school day timetable. In mainstream English schools, you will typically have five to eight lessons a day, each of them typically between 40 and 60 minutes in length. Normally, you will have all these lessons in different subjects – at most, you will have two in the same subject in the same day. You will also have an approximately 20-minute morning breaktime and a 40-to-60-minute lunch period. But many educational theorists see that as not providing enough variety, rest and focus in itself. Instead, they have argued for things like spaced learning and interleaving. Spaced learning is when a topic is spread out over a long period of time – rather than learning it all in one lesson, you instead spread it out over several lessons or even several weeks while mixing it in with unrelated stuff. As Guibert might have been hinting at here, it requires students to immediately commit things to their long term memory rather than try and hold them in their working memory and then retrieve them as and when required – its quite good for retrieval practice (being tested on previously learned content – something I try and do a lot in my lessons) and revision. Interleaving is when, during a lesson, you take a break from the current content to look at a slightly different but related topic within the same subject area, before coming back to the topic you’re currently studying. Both the structure of the modern school day, interleaving and spaced learning sound very similar to what Guibert was recommending, and are based on the same logic.

Guibert sums up thus how shambolic the education he received was, and in doing so imparts some truly timeless wisdom:

While my master was taking it out on me for not knowing what he himself did not know, he might have been well advised to consider the harm he had done by squeezing out of my frail little head what he had never put there in the first place. Lunatics’ words can be barely understood by the sane, if at all; similarly the utterances of people who are ignorant but pretend to know something, and who pass on their “knowledge” to others, become even murkier when they attempt to explain what they are saying. There is nothing harder than trying to hold forth on something you cannot understand. It is obscure for the speaker, and even more so for the hearer; it is really as if both were being turned to stone. I’m saying this, O Lord, not because I want to stigmatise this man who, all things considered, was a good friend, but in order to let the readers know, whoever they might be, that we must not be entitled to teach as truth anything that crosses our minds. Let us not lose other people in the clouds of our own theories.

Sources cited:

A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert de Nogent, translated and with an introduction by Pail J Archambault, University of Pennsylvania Press (1996), pp 16 – 19

Jay Rubinstein, Guibert de Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind, Routledge (2013), p 13

Education Endowment Foundation, Cognitive Neuroscience in the Classroom: A Review of the Evidence (2021)