14-17 Th-century Western Gentleman Education Thought Research

"Gentleman" first appeared in the work of Pietro Paolo Vergerio, a humanism educator during the Italian Renaissance. Ever since then a lasting and impassioned discussion on "Gentleman Education" has been aroused among western educational circles. The process of forming a systematic thought about western gentleman education lasted for4centuries, when the basic spirit and connotation of the method experienced the metamorphosis along with the historical transition. As classical culture was the essential subject of gentleman education in that period,"Gentleman" was a typical scholar-type entrepreneur from the14th century to the early years of the16th century in Italian. Pietro Paolo Vergerio, Petrus Paulus Vergerius and Baldesar Castiglione unearthed the new connotation of "Seven Arts", which was raised in the middle ages, and revealed its secular side to common people, although they hadn’t contribute a systematic statement on the content and method of gentleman education. They oriented gentleman education to a kind of Christian humanism gentleman education, which prepared for the16th century’s European Reformation movement in terms of theory. In the16th century, the Renaissance and Reformation movement surfaced the gentleman education in northern countries with morality and humanism. Comparing with the earlier Italian gentleman educational thoughts, Desiderius Euasmus, an educator of the Netherlands, inherited the tradition of Italian humanistic gentleman education furthest on the basis of his unique Christian culture, and Thomas Elyot put forward an educational theory that would be fit for their national development according to British national conditions rather than elaborating Euasmus’s educational thought to the British, while the French educator Michel de Montaigne, whose gentleman educational thought reflected the practicability and necessity most, further returned education to "Oneself. Finally, John Milton and John Locke, two great gentleman educators in the17th century, took gentleman education from the paradise to human world, from classic to the reality, and pushed the modern western gentleman education to the summit under the unique British noble system and the tradition of elite education. The classical content of gentleman education was fading away at that time, while the orientation of paying equal attention to liberal arts and practical subjects endowed gentleman education with new vitalities and guide English gentleman education to a long history.