Good historical works on medieval educational methods?

[RenegadeHealer]

This is a very complex subject, as medieval attitudes to education varied enormously from our own concepts.
I could summarise it by saying that the medieval European believed that the "ancients", the Greeks and Romans, had far more knowledge than they did, and so the point of education was not to advance through research, but to rediscover the lost knowledge of the ancients.
From that paradigm arose scholasticism. Research questions were resolved through debate, or dialectics, based always upon pre-existing knowledge.
Basically, a student was expected to memorise vast amounts of knowledge, and be expected to be well versed in the art of Rhetoric and debate. A university professor would not teach - instead, he would lead debates, one to one knock-outs amongst his students until only the best (the ones who had memorised the most, the ones who could regurgitate the largest amounts of ancient knowledge) survived.
To a certain amount, independent thinkers were viewed with suspicion.
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Interestingly enough, I strongly suspect the culture of medicine and the way it initiates new physicians inherited a lot of its general format and flavor from scholasticism. Almost everything you just wrote could have been written about my experience with medical training. The only exception is the part about lost ancient knowledge; modern medicine is much more future-oriented than past-oriented. But new medical trainees will be definitely be tortured emotionally until they come to a realization that they know nothing, and are empty vessels prostrate before their teachers, waiting to be filled. This was typically called "being [more] humble" in medical training. Independent thinking and bringing life experience and knowledge from outside of the medical field are not encouraged, because these things do not encourage humility. Being obedient, and memorizing encyclopedic amounts of knowledge from the greats who came before you are the done thing. Blessed are those medical students who take to heart Socrates famous proclamation: "I know nothing."

I grew up with many family members who were teachers (though all in the liberal humanities, not the sciences), and I naively thought that I understood all Western pedagogy was headed in the direction of informal congenial discussions and free expression of ideas. I got a very rude awakening in medical school.

I'll stop navel-gazing now. What makes this pertinent to the VMS is that medicine appears to be one of the major topics that the VMS might cover, and that a student who composed it might have been learning. It fascinates me as a physician that this mysterious old book I'm obsessed with might have a deep connection to my line of work, and the tradition of medical education. I definitely want to talk to some of my teachers and colleagues who know about the history of medicine and medical education in the West, and see what they could tell me about how physicians were trained in the middle ages.