Modernism

History of Modernism

The modernist movement, in all its forms, can be bracketed in the time span between Copernicus' positing of a sun-centered universe in the 16th century along with the scientific revolution this spawned and the quantum revolution of the 20th century. By the end of World War II (in the mid-1940s), modernism and all it stood for (including its progressive phase) had died. After WWII, the advanced industrial countries of the West, entered a new age, one Jean François Lyotard labeled postmodern. This new, computerized, information-dominated age both fascinated and frightened Lyotard.

Ramus's work preceded, slightly, the scientific revolution spawned by Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei, all of whom accepted and advanced the astronomical work of Copernicus a century earlier. Together these movements Ramism in education (with a special interest in curriculum) and the scientific revolutionushered in the modern age, one logically ordered, scientifically framed, Protestant in its values, commercial in its outlook. Prior to Ramus, education was a piecemeal affair, young children learning to read and write from dames (wives and mothers) and proceeding onto study as they wished with itinerant teachers. The church schools (i.e., Catholic) were a bit more formalized, with the Jesuits, in 1599a half century after Ramusproducing their ratio studiorum (i.e., plan of study). Ramus, a Catholic of Protestant persuasiona persuasion for which he (literally) lost his head in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 when students broke into his University of Paris rooms and severing his head from his body, threw the former out the windowwas a professor and schoolmaster. As a schoolmaster, he trained boys ages 8 to 16 for the university; as a professor, he organized the knowledge he taught the boys into what, borrowing from John Calvin (curriculum vita or path of life), he called a curriculum. The word curriculum (Latin for circular path) was used by Ramus to designate not a racetrack, but rather a course of study to follow. He laid out this path in a linear, hierarchal, and orderly manner (actually a visual chart) beginning with the most general (i.e., that which came first) and proceeding in a step-by-step pattern. Ramus's charts, much akin to the bracketing done in current tennis, golf, or basketball tournaments (or to university or corporate line and flow charts from presidents through vice presidents to deans or directors to faculty or employees), were usually dichotomized into splits or two or three. Thus, knowledge to be taught would be split into the trivium and quadrivium with the trivium split into grammar, logic, and rhetoric and the quadrivium split into arithmetic, geometry, music and ethics, and physics and astronomy. These individual subjects would again be split into subparts: arithmetic would be split into addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. Addition would then be split into whole numbers, positive and negative integers, fractions, and so on. Subtraction, multiplication, and division would follow the same branching (ramification). This charting of knowledge into a visual representation (logical, orderly, hierarchal) was a great advance on previous, disorganized forms of representation, either woodcutsthe most famous of which was the tower of knowledge with a key (the alphabet) [Page 581]unlocking the basement door and the flag of philosophy fluttering from the top turretor just long memory lists given in no particular order. Ramus's sequencing of knowledge in a logical form became popular with the rising merchant classit was both orderly and efficient. As an organized way to study, curriculum entered the protestant universities of Leyden and Glasgow in the early 1600s.

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