The Roman schools, elementary and secondary, seem to have been conducted in a verandah, and boys and girls seem to have been taught in the same school. The chief Roman writers on education are Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian. Quintilian tells us that Cato also wrote a treatise on the subject, but that that work had been lost. The oratorical training of which Quintilian was the expositor seems to have been largely out of connection with real life; and, though he claims that the orator must be a widely cultured, wise, and honourable man, seems to have developed a tendency to the bombastic abuse of ornate and stilted speech. The practical effects, too, of the corruption of family education were far from satisfactory. Moral degradation followed, and humanity seems to have been rescued only by the introduction of a new ideal of life, which substituted for the pagan self-reliance, self-control, moderation, and proportion, self-denial, self-forgetfulness, and humility; which made the last, indeed, the chief virtue, and looked on pride and self-confidence as spiritual sins.
The introduction of Christianity was followed by the inroads into the Roman Empire of barbarous tribes from the north and east. Before these attacks the Western Roman Empire collapsed, and with it to a greater or less extent the educational system of the time.
It must be remembered that between three and four hundred years elapsed between the downfall of the Western Roman Empire and the beginnings of the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne. Classical or pagan culture, as profane learning, was at a discount, and the aim of the monasticism which grew out of the introduction of Christianity was mystic absorption in the contemplation of God.
This interval was followed by the efforts of Charlemagne to revive Roman culture, and to establish schools throughout Western Europe. In this he was aided by Alcuin and other scholars from England, where in the comparative quiet that followed the conquest of Britain there had grown up a system of education. Throughout his dominions three classes of schools were established by Charlemagne, the Palace School, the Bishop's School, and the Monastery School. These were intended to take the place of the splendid system of public schools that had grown up under the Roman Empire. The course of studies established in these mediæval schools, following the practice of Greece and Rome, was divided into two parts: the _Trivium_, including Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric; and the _Quadrivium_, which embraced Geometry, Arithmetic, Music, and Astronomy. Education in the palace or castle schools had a different aim. It sought to develop the bodily powers, and to awake in the pupils that respect for the weak which was shown in the worship of women, and that love of justice, and belief in its supremacy, which characterized the _chivalry_ of the Middle Ages.