Room at the Top

Renaissance, reformation, revolution – the three Rs. Few of us would quarrel with the view that the early modem period saw the culmination of an intellectual revolution of tremendous proportions in the west. But since the early 1950s the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England have been represented typically as times of radical social and political change in part effected by an educational revolution. These were the years when the government of England became centralised, when her religion became Protestant, when her ruling elite forsook the art of war and took up reading. Now aristocrats and gentlemen set out to serve the commonwealth. Now the minister saw his chief duty as that of expounding the faith to the people, making clear to them their duties of faith, obedience and service within this same Christian commonwealth. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge, we are told, educated these superior servants of the state, thus both bringing about and perpetuating change. The two universities educated a higher proportion of the nation's male youth than at any time before the late nineteenth century.