Deanna Horner, age 14, of Burlington, Vt., for her question:
WHEN WAS THE FIRST MODERN UNIVERSITY STARTED?
Modern universities developed in Europe during the 1100s. They started as collections of scholars organized into corporations. The word university comes from the Latin universitas, the term for corporation or guild in the Middle Ages.
The model for the majority of universities in northern Europe was the University of Paris, which became the largest and most famous in Europe during the 1200s. Most of the northern schools developed from teachers’ guilds at cathedral schools. The guilds charged a fee to train students and to grant degrees.
The universities that developed from these guilds were run by a corporations of teachers. Most of them specialized in liberal arts and theology.
Most southern European universities were modeled after the University of Bologna in Italy, which started as a law school in the 1000s. These schools developed as students’ guilds.
Most of the students at the southern universities were mature and successful professional people, while many students in the north were in their early teens or even younger. It could be expected, therefore, that students in the south would organize themselves into guilds. The guilds then hired professors and set the conditions under which they worked.
Most southern European universities were nonreligious in origin and specialized in law or medicine.
During the Middle Ages, the universities did not require students to have a completed primary and secondary education to be admitted. A student might enter the university at the age of 10 and not know how to read. Since he was taught orally, he might not learn to read and write until he was in his late teens.
By 1500, nearly 80 universities had been founded in Europe. Some that still exist today include the universities of Cambridge and Oxford in England and Heidelberg in Germany.
Also existing today are Montpellier, Paris and Toulouse in France; Bologna, Florence, Naples, Padua, Rome and Siena in Italy; and Salamanca in Spain.
In England, early universities were formed to provide living quarters and dining rooms for various groups of students. Usually these students took similar studies and so the word college came to refer to a specific field of learning.
Properly speaking, a school that is called a university should deal with nearly all fields of learning. But universities today may differ in the variety of their educational programs and in their specialized fields of study.
Most universities provide a wide range of graduate schools. They may also have graduate professional schools or colleges. But few universities teach as many branches of learning as the word university implies.
During the 1500s in Europe, many elementary schools were established where children of common citizens learned to read the Bible in their native languages.