Teaching

The stimulating humanistic-renaissance period represented a watershed in the pedagogical practices of the Western world. The legacy of the past, interacting with the challenges of the present, brought about a change in the cultural climate and opened new paths in the context of religious reforms, together with the expression of a research destined to become permanent. The educational act took on almost revolutionary values: the idea of learning theoretically and not only through practice, the questioning of tradition, new ways to look at the world, the will to understand and regulate, intellectual reflection, and the set of social behaviors. These premises were created for those fundamental transformations which, in the Sixteenth century, led to the renewal of all levels of teaching. This chapter examines the history of teaching practices and methodologies of literacy inside and outside educational institutions and analyses the training of professionals - an issue of great debate regarding the ongoing need for training. The extent is not limited to the “knowledge professionals” found in ecclesiastics or universities, but a range of social groups, as influenced and in some cases accelerated, by the Reformation. In addition, the chapter reflects on the very nature of education - its meaning and intrinsic and extrinsic purposes: from curricula to exams, from periodic checks to the acquisition of academic degrees. Attention to places and contexts leads to observe, behind the events of the past, the common traits and peculiarities of paths that are often intertwined. This provides an immense variety of “masterful agents”. Not only men and women engaged in works of literacy, catechesis, acculturation and teaching, but, as noted by Rousseau notes (the last of a cultural tradition marked by Plutarch, Erasmus and Comenius), a process entrusted to the authority of nature and things in the intricate becoming of modernity.