University

By 1600 European universities were beginning a period of decline in accomplishments and influence that lasted about 250 years. Many new schools arose in both Catholic and Protestant Europe to take students away from universities and to offer employment for scholars. In the Catholic world the Society of Jesus or Jesuits and other new religious orders developed schools that taught part of the university curriculum. The Jesuits began by teaching Latin grammar, humanities, and rhetoric to boys aged ten to sixteen, then added a three-year program of logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics at a higher level, as well as mathematics and occasionally other subjects. These were university subjects. The Jesuits had 578 schools, many with university-level instruction, across Europe in 1679. In Protestant Europe academies competed with universities. These were small schools offering higher instruction in a limited number of disciplines, especially arts and theology, without necessarily conferring degrees. The prototype was the Geneva Academy, founded by John Calvin in 1559. Academies hired excellent teachers and took students away from universities.

Learned societies, such as the Royal Society of London for the Advancement of Natural Knowledge, founded in 1662, offered more competition to universities by supporting scholars without requiring them to teach. Most learned societies on the Continent received funding from governments, which enabled them to offer salaries to members who carried on research in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and other subjects without teaching.

Enlightenment philosophes of the eighteenth century strongly criticized universities for not being useful to society because they held on to a traditional curriculum, a criticism often repeated in the next two centuries. The philosophes persuaded rulers to create nonuniversity institutions of higher learning to teach specialized practical subjects, such as agricultural technology, engineering, military science, surgery, even painting. They thought that such institutions would produce citizens capable of contributing useful knowledge to society and the state. Napoléon Bonaparte (who ruled France and much of Europe from 1799 to 1815) agreed. He abolished many universities in France and Germany and created technical schools in their place.