Western Culture Global Presents

The Top 100 Heroes of Western Culture
These individuals have most contributed to replacing ignorance with knowledge, savagery with civilization, disease with health, tyranny with liberty, poverty with abundance, and despair with happiness.



#41: Vittorino da Feltre (1378-1446)

Vittorino da Feltre (1378-1446) was an Italian and a Renaissance educator pioneer.

During the Middle Ages, a secular education or learning was generally condemned by the Christians because it was considered materialistic and too concerned with this world. Feltre, like other humanists of his time, began to challenge religion-inspired ignorance by valuing worldliness, including a Greco-Roman-inspired education and the practical benefits it provides for this life.

Feltre founded an influential school that taught history, grammar, logic, poetry, mathematics, astronomy and music. This classical education represented the first of its kind in nearly 800 years.

The Renaissance was truly a time of rebirth, when individuals like Feltre began to free the human mind from the shackles of religion. Had the Renaissance not occurred, much of mankind may still today be immersed in the ignorance and misery that typified the Middle Ages.



Go to #42: James Clerk Maxwell


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