Course:History 344 Nasty Families/Education/University

University

As was fitting for a member of the English gentry, many young men sought out education higher than grammar school by attending university for a few years. The only two universities in England during the 17th century were Oxford and Cambridge. These two institutions took in 13 percent of gentlemen's son's during this period with the intent of providing an education as well as a place to create social bonds and opportunities .

Many students did not complete an entire degree, especially if they were the first born son and not required to enter a profession, but often younger sons needed a full education to move on to specializations such as medicine or theology. Many topics would be covered; the classics, mathematics, languages, geography, and other such topics that would prepare a gentleman for the rigours of political office or a dinner party with social elites. Younger sons would often stay on at the university and continue to work as a lecturer , thereby providing for themselves and attaining a position of prestige and honour. Attendance to either Cambridge or Oxford was generally dictated by how close the school was to home for any individuals student . A young man would generally leave for university around the age of sixteen . To complete the most basic degree, a Bachelor of the Arts, would take a student about four years . This degree would enable a student to become a teacher or be seen as accomplished. In order to complete a masters, a student would spend about 3 more years at school. In order to complete degrees in civil law, medicine, or divinity, it would take about 4 years, depending on the program

To pay for school, students of less wealthy families could gain scholarships or engage in a type of "work study"

The origins of the two English universities can be traced to the 12th and 13th centuries respectively. The term University was derived from universitas, the community of masters and scholars. At the start these were informal and not institutionalized. It was only as they further developed that they gained their structure. In this collegiate structure one could ‘determine’ as a Bachelor of Arts after four years of study and could ‘incept’ as a Masters of Arts after an additional three years of study. Then these Masters of Arts could go on to the higher studies of theology or canon or civil law or even go into Medicine. The original Bachelors of Arts consisted of the seven liberal arts (or sciences) of the classical curriculum, divided into the trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric, and the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. During the latter half of the 16th century the colleges wanted to attract fee paying undergraduates and began to build accommodations for them. In the 16th century, the Universities underwent a drastic change of social function; it was only in the period of 1530-1570 that the universities stopped being merely the institutional organs of the church, and members of the gentry class began to go there for a higher education. Both the clergy and the Government were becoming dominated by the educated. Numbers of gentlemen and nobility in the universities began to rise from this point until in the 1630’s there were several times more men attending university than in the Middle Ages. In 1584 only 48% of parliament had been at university or Inns of Court but by 1640-1642 that number had increased to 70%.

BN: Important page. Could use re-structuring with subheadings.