Editing Age of Enlightenment (section)

===Schools and universities===
{{Main|Education in the Age of Enlightenment}}
Most work on the Enlightenment emphasizes the ideals discussed by intellectuals, rather than the actual state of education at the time. Leading educational theorists like England's John Locke and Switzerland's Jean Jacques Rousseau both emphasized the importance of shaping young minds early. By the late Enlightenment, there was a rising demand for a more universal approach to education, particularly after the American Revolution and the French Revolution.

The predominant educational psychology from the 1750s onward, especially in northern European countries, was [[associationism]]: the notion that the mind associates or dissociates ideas through repeated routines. In addition to being conducive to Enlightenment ideologies of liberty, self-determination, and personal responsibility, it offered a practical theory of the mind that allowed teachers to transform longstanding forms of print and manuscript culture into effective graphic tools of learning for the lower and middle orders of society.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Eddy |first=Matthew Daniel |title=The Shape of Knowledge: Children and the Visual Culture of Literacy and Numeracy |journal=Science in Context |year=2013 |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=215–245 |url=https://www.academia.edu/1817033 |doi=10.1017/s0269889713000045 |s2cid=147123263}}</ref> Children were taught to memorize facts through oral and graphic methods that originated during the Renaissance.<ref>{{cite book |last=Hotson |first=Howard |title=Commonplace Learning: Ramism and Its German Ramifications 1543–1630 |year=2007 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=Oxford}}</ref>

Many of the leading universities associated with Enlightenment progressive principles were located in northern Europe, with the most renowned being the universities of Leiden, Göttingen, Halle, Montpellier, Uppsala, and Edinburgh. These universities, especially Edinburgh, produced professors whose ideas had a significant impact on Britain's North American colonies and later the American Republic. Within the natural sciences, Edinburgh's medical school also led the way in chemistry, anatomy, and pharmacology.<ref name="Eddy2008" /> In other parts of Europe, the universities and schools of France and most of Europe were bastions of traditionalism and were not hospitable to the Enlightenment. In France, the major exception was the medical university at Montpellier.<ref>Elizabeth Williams, ''A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier'' (2003) p. 50</ref>