History of European universities
European universities date from the founding of the University of Bologna in 1088 or the University of Paris (c. 1150–70). The original medieval universities arose from the Roman Catholic Church schools. Their purposes included training professionals, scientific investigation, improving society, and teaching critical thinking and research. External influences, such as Renaissance humanism (c. mid-14th century), the discovery of the New World (1492), the Protestant Reformation (1517), the Age of Enlightenment (18th century), and the recurrence of political revolution, enhanced the importance of human rights and international law in the university curricula.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, European universities concentrated upon science and research, their structures and philosophies having shaped the contemporary university. The French Ecole Polytechnique was established in 1794 by the mathematician Gaspard Monge during the Revolution, and it became a military academy under Napoleon I in 1804. The German university — the Humboldtian model — established by Wilhelm von Humboldt was based upon Friedrich Schleiermacher's liberal ideas about the importance of freedom, seminars, and laboratories, which, like the French university model, involved strict discipline and control of every aspect of the university. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the universities concentrated upon science, but were not open to the general populace until after 1914. Moreover, until the end of the 19th century, religion exerted a significant, limiting influence upon academic curricula and research, by when the German university model had become the world standard. Elsewhere, the British also had established universities world-wide, thus making higher education available to the world's populaces.
The European university legacy[edit]
Ultimately, European universities established the intellectual and academic traditions of university education worldwide; by the 19th century's end, the Humboldtian university model was established in Europe, the US, and Japan.[53] In the Americas, first the Spanish, then the British, and then the French founded universities in the lands they had conquered early in the 16th century,[57] meant to professionally educate their colonists and propagate monotheistic religion to establish formal, administrative rule of their American colonies; like-wise, the British in Canada, Australia, and the Cape Colony. Japan, the Near East, and Africa all had universities based on European models in the 19th century. Those universities disseminated Western European science and technology and trained the local population (foremost the local elite) to develop their countries resources;[58] and, although most promoted the social, political, economic, and cultural aims of the imperial rulers, some promoted revolutionary development of the colonial societies.[59] In the 20th century, urbanization and industrialization made a university education available to the mass populace.[60] Throughout, the basic structure and research purposes of the universities have remained constant; per Clark Kerr, they "are among the least changed of institutions".[61]