Abelard's World

Peter Abelard was a teacher around the time of the First Crusade. No doubt there were some constraints on his teaching imposed by the Catholic Church, yet the Church was also the major source of his funding. And notwithstanding the pitfalls described in his Historia Calamitata, Abelard seems not to have wanted for much during his entire time as a teacher and abbot.

Among his peers, Abelard did as most academics do today, arguing over the finer points of topics of some cultural significance--in his case a variety of theological issues, and not least the equal personhood of the Holy Spirit within the trinity. Mainstay as this was, however, Abelard was also a teacher. Burke would have approved Abelard's bringing younger scholars into the track of his discoveries, whether as a peripatetic (traveling) scholar around Paris, or later in his abbey. Modern sensibilities would likely approve Abelard's special attention to Heloïse, as well, at least until that attention became too special. And of course, Heloïse's family let Abelard know their disapproval of that liaison in no uncertain terms.

The point I want to make here is that while Abelard had no end of intellectual disputes with his peers, still he enjoyed a certain freedom in his teaching that modern instructors lack; and I wonder how much this has to do, not with changing educational norms as such--though of course they have changed--so much as trends toward monetizing everything. For any given definition of "good", what dollar value (or pound, Euro, rouble, peso, yen, yuan, won, rupee, rupiah, etc.) really attaches to a "good" education?

Whether in my own experience as a unionized adjunct instructor, or considering all the hoopla about teachers' unions in Wisconsin and California these days, or charter schools here in Michigan, I feel like so much of the debate about education concerns what amount of money to throw at what part of the problem, and accountability for how it is (or is not) spent. In Abelard's day, some 900 years ago, well, a couple of observations:

1. Money seems not to have been an issue. The Church and Western society in general at the time seemed to value what little formal education was available, and paid for it accordingly, whether privately or through the Church. Direct payment of any kind appears only once in Abelard's history--in chapter 6--and quite clearly as a ruse, rather than concerning the necessities of his life.
2. A fair bit of secular education was craft-specific, and would continue to be for some centuries after Abelard's time. JF Bosher notes in his book, The Canada Merchants, some writings on commercial education that disdained the learning of the nobility. As it should have done: the two were clearly different. Likewise with Church learning in Abelard's time: as important as spiritual and moral life could be in the medieval world, the less formal, family- and craft-based education that took place in homes across France, Europe, perhaps the whole premodern world, rarely if ever presupposed uniformity of curriculum, or public money set aside for (this kind of) education.

A critical observation here, on pre-modern France: with some 90% of the population doing farm work, monetization was of little concern. A good bit of subsistence came "free" from the land, trade in goods and in kind remained  acceptable as a form of commerce, and economic interdependence--especially across long distances--was relatively limited. Yet how many farmers would gladly have given housing space, textile work and excess crops for a teacher like Abelard to come and educate their children? Not in the state curriculum, mind, but in exactly the thing that Burke proposed: means by which to follow in the track of the instructor's musings and discoveries.

And so for a question that superimposes the mores of Abelard's time on our own: Setting aside the obvious anachronism, what kinds of economic wizardry or revolutionary shifts of mind would it take for the "educational establishment" or even world culture at large to recognize that money may not be the central issue in education?