About 1000 years later, Pope Gregory VII decided the clergy needed to be educated. This was a good idea since clerics were very powerful and it was important that they all were properly trained in Church dogma. As far as I can ascertain, this was the first time in history that a large number of people needed to be educated at once. Up until then, teachers worked with their small, loyal band of disciples. Now the economics of scale required a new approach and the Pope came up with a brilliant solution. The clergy often lived in monasteries that had auditoria for their religious services. Many of these monks were unbelievably good at copying things down. People would spend their entire adult lives copying scriptures with incredible accuracy. Gregory’s clever idea was to use the existing technology to capitalize on and extend people’s skills. The auditoria were filled with monks sitting in what now became lecture halls, copying down the words read by the “lecturer” (from the Latin for “reader”) as they progressed through their manuscript. Lecturers could actually be fined if they deviated from what was written in front of them. When finished, each clergyman had their very own faithfully copied manuscript and they could hire themselves out as a lecturer somewhere else. Considering that the Pope’s decree came down in 1079, nearly 400 years before Gutenberg’s printing press, this was a fantastic way to accurately duplicate and disseminate materials. In fact, it was such a great combination of ideas that we’ve been continuing to do it for more than ten centuries.
R.J. Beichner “History and Evolution of Active Learning Spaces“