DOCTORES PUERORUM

By the end of the thirteenth century, a new class of specialist elementary teacher was emerging. These were the doctores puerorum, who have been noted as early as in Florence and were numerous there by the turn of the fourteenth century. With their appearance a marked distinction had arisen between Italian elementary and secondary education; this new specialization is evident in the many outlines of school curricula which first began to appear in the fourteenth century. Such syllabuses were laid out by the communes, usually because teachers were allowed to charge higher fees to more advanced pupils. In Arezzo during the 1430s and 1440s, for example, there were three levels of teaching: the most elementary class was for pupils not yet reading Donatus; the second was for the Donatists; the third and most advanced was for the study of the Latin language (lactinare) and literature (auctores). This kind of division was typical throughout fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Italy, and it held true for private tutors as well as public elementary and grammar schools. There was usually a clear division between elementary and grammar or Latin education, towns often employing one type of teacher for reading and writing and a real grammarian for Latin.