Famous Ramus

Okay so Ramus actually isn't super famous, but maybe he should be.

If we are going to study any Puritan educational philosophy, we have to spend time on Peter Ramus.

Pierre de la Ramée was a 16th Century Humanist Protestant.  Even though he had significant disagreements with prominent reformers such as Bullinger and Beza, Ramus was counted as a protestant martyr when he was killed during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.  He had been a student of Johannes Sturm, the "German Cicero" and major reformer of education in Strasbourg.  (Richard Gamble has a fun reading from Sturm in The Great Tradition).  Apparently, Sturm sparked Ramus' great interest in the study and application of logic. 

Ramus, being the orderly, logical mathematician that he was, looked at the Trivium as it was taught in his day, and thought it was disorganized.  In Logic and Rhetoric in England: 1500-1700, Howell says,

As Ramus looked at the scholastic logic, the traditional rhetoric, and the conventional grammar of his day, he was troubled by what seemed to him to be redundancy and indecisiveness in the theories of these basic liberal arts.

Ramus really didn't want any of the liberal arts to overlap with each other.  He wanted to define logic, rhetoric, and grammar in such a way as to give each of these arts their own topics without intermingling.  This was part of the new Reformed and later Puritan idea of the universal law of justice.  This may seem a strange way to use the word justice, but you can still see evidence of this old understanding in our use of the term "justified."  Ramus thought this would be a good way to simplify education so that students could go more in-depth into each art without redundancy.   Howell explains the passion Ramus had for an orderly method of study, especially for logic:

To Ramus, logic was the center of the program of liberal studies, and the chief instrument of man in the quest for salvation.  In fact, the strength of Ramus's passion for this subject can be inferred from his own statement that God is the only perfect logician, that man surpasses the beasts by virtue of his capacity to reason syllogistically, and that one man surpasses another only so far as his address to the problem of method is superior.

So Ramus was maybe a bit odd there.  But it shows that the Puritans who followed him were very interested in reason, as well, which had huge implications for the scientific revolution.

Ramus did some redefining of the art of rhetoric that few agreed with, but what seems to have stuck was his work to make rhetoric apply to vernacular literature rather than just Latin works.

One major area in which Ramus defied Aristotle and the scholastics was in his belief that there was only one logic that applied to both science and rhetoric.  I've not read much Aristotle myself but I will defer to what Ramus himself said about it:

Aristotle wished to make two logics, one for science, and the other for opinion; in which (saving the honor of so great a master) he has very greatly erred.

We can see the influence of Ramus really show up, visually as well as logically, in his use of binary trees to simplify with the goal of pursuing an organized depth of content.  The Puritans grabbed a hold of this type of logical, visual organization to help systematize theology and that is how we get to William Ames's Technometry.  Preceding Ames was William Perkins, whose "Golden Chain" you can see here (when that page loads, scroll down it to see the image).  As a Cambridge theologian who taught many influential Puritan students such as Thomas Hooker and John Cotton, Perkins sent Ramist logic to America.  William Ames, the author of Technometry, was also a student of Perkins, although he never came to America himself.  His books did, however, and in them, we can see hints of Ramism, binary trees and all.