The History of Education Part 84

[4] It is the great mixed races that have counted for most in history. The strength of England is in part due to its wonderful mixture of peoples-- Britons, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Northmen, to mention only the more important earlier peoples which have been welded together to form the English people.

[5] Athens, however, permitted the children of foreigners to attend its schools, particularly in the later period of Athenian education.

[6] "When I compare the customs of the Greeks with these (the Romans), I can find no reason to extol either those of the Spartans, or the Thebans, or even of the Athenians, who value themselves the most for their wisdom; all who, jealous of their n.o.bility and communicating to none or to very few the privileges of their cities ... were so far from receiving any advantage from this haughtiness that they became the greatest sufferers by it." (Dionysius of Halicarna.s.sus, in his _Roman Antiquities_ book II, chap. XVII.)

[7] In Sparta the number of citizens was still less. At the time of the formulation of the Spartan const.i.tution by Lycurgus (about 850 B.C.) there were but 9000 Spartan families in the midst of 250,000 subject people.

This disproportion increased rather than diminished in later centuries.

[8] The Austrian-Magyar combination, which held together and dominated the many tribes of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, is an a.n.a.logous modern situation, though on a much larger scale.

[9] Two Greek poems ill.u.s.trate the Spartan mother, who was said to admonish her sons to come back with their shields, or upon them. The first is:

"Eight sons Daementa at Sparta's call Sent forth to fight: one tomb received them all.

No tears she shed, but shouted, 'Victory!

Sparta, I bore them but to die for thee.'"

The second:

"A Spartan, his companion slain, Alone from battle fled: His mother, kindling with disdain That she had borne him, struck him dead; For courage and not birth alone.

In Sparta testifies a son."

"Go, tell at Sparta, thou that pa.s.sest by, That here, obedient to her laws, we lie."

(Epitaph on the three hundred who fell at Thermopylae.)

[10] An Athenian saying, of a man who was missing, was: "Either he is dead or has become a schoolmaster." To call a man a schoolmaster was to abuse him, according to Epicurus. Demosthenes, in his attack on Aeschines, ridicules him for the fact that his father was a schoolmaster in the lowest type of reading and writing school. "As a boy," he says, "you were reared in abject poverty, waiting with your father on the school, grinding the ink, sponging the benches, sweeping the room, and doing the duty of a menial rather than of a freeman's son." Lucian represents kings as being forced to maintain themselves in h.e.l.l by teaching reading and writing.

[11] Women were not supposed to possess any of the privileges of citizenship, belonging rather to the alien cla.s.s. They lived secluded lives, were not supposed to take any part in public affairs, and, if their husbands brought company to the house, they were expected to retire from view. In their att.i.tude toward women the Greeks were an oriental rather than a modern or western people.

[12] "We learn first the names of the elements of speech, which are called _grammata_; then their shape and functions; then the syllables and their affections; lastly, the parts of speech, and the particular mutations connected with each, as inflection, number, contraction, accents, position in the sentence; then we begin to read and write, at first in syllables and slowly, but when we have attained the necessary certainty, easily and quickly." (Dionysius of Halicarna.s.sus, _De Compos. Verb_, cap 25.)

[13] Fragments of a tile found in Attica have stamped upon them the syllables _ar, bar, gar; er, ber, ger_; etc. A bottle-shaped vase has also been found which, in addition to the alphabet, contains p.r.o.nouncing exercises as follows:

bi-ba-bu-be zi-za-zu-ze pi-pa-pu-pe gi-ga-gu-ge mi-ma-mu-me etc.

[14] "Learning to read must have been a difficult business in h.e.l.las, for books were written only in capitals at this time. There were no s.p.a.ces between the words, and no stops were inserted. Thus the reader had to exercise his ingenuity before he could arrive at the meaning of a sentence." (Freeman, K. J., _Schools of h.e.l.las_, p. 87.)

[15] The Greeks had no numbers, but only words for numbers, and used the letters of the Greek alphabet with accents over them to indicate the words they knew as numbers. Counting and bookkeeping would of course be very difficult with such a system.

[16] "These poems, especially Homer, Hesiod, and Theognis, served at the same time for drill in language and for recitation, whereby on the one hand the memory was developed and the imagination strengthened, and on the other the heroic forms of antiquity and healthy primitive utterances regarding morality, and full of homely common sense, were deeply engraved on the young mind. Homer was regarded not merely as a poet, but as an inspired moral teacher, and great portions of his poems were learned by heart. The Iliad and the Odyssey were in truth the Bible of the Greeks."

(Laurie, S. S., _Pre-Christian Education_, p. 258.)

[17] Davidson, Thos., _Aristotle_, pp. 73-75.

[18] Plutarch later expressed well the Greek conception of musical education in these words: "Whoever be he that shall give his mind to the study of music in his youth, if he meet with a musical education proper for the forming and regulating his inclinations, he will be sure to applaud and embrace that which is n.o.ble and generous, and to rebuke and blame the contrary, as well in other things as in what belongs to music.

And by that means he will become clear from all reproachful actions, for now having reaped the n.o.blest fruit of music, he may be of great use, not only to himself, but to the commonwealth; while music teaches him to abstain from everything that is indecent, both in word and deed, and to observe decorum, temperance, and regularity." (Monroe, Paul, _History of Education_, p. 92.)

[19] A flat circle of polished bronze, or other metal, eight or nine inches in diameter.

[20] "There were no home influences in h.e.l.las. The men-folk lived out of doors. The young Athenian from his sixth year onward spent his whole day away from home, in the company of his contemporaries, at school or palaestra, or in the streets. When he came home there was no home life.

His mother was a nonent.i.ty, living in the woman's apartments; he probably saw little of her. His real home was the palaestra, his companions his contemporaries and his _paidagogos_. He learned to disa.s.sociate himself from his family and a.s.sociate himself with his fellow citizens. No doubt he lost much by this system, but the solidarity of the State gained."

(Freeman, K. J., _Schools of h.e.l.las_, p. 282.)

[21] "No doubt the Athenian public was by no means so learned as we moderns are; they were ignorant of many sciences, of much history,--in short of a thousand results of civilization which have since accrued. But in civilization itself, in mental power, in quickness of comprehension, in correctness of taste, in accuracy of judgment, no modern nation, however well instructed, has been able to equal by labored acquirements the inborn genius of the Greeks." (Mahaffy, J. P., _Old Greek Education_.)

[22] The great inst.i.tutions of the Greek City-State were in themselves highly educative. The chief of these were:

1. The a.s.sembly, where the laws were proposed, debated, and made.

2. The Juries, on which citizens sat and where the laws were applied.

3. The Theater, where the great masterpieces of Greek literature were performed.

4. The Olympian and other Games, which were great religious ceremonies of a literary as well as an athletic and artistic character, and to which Greeks from all over h.e.l.las came.

5. The city life itself, among an inquisitive, imaginative, and disputatious people.

CHAPTER II

[1] The culmination came in what is known as the Age of Pericles, who was the master mind at Athens from 459 to 431 B.C. During the fifth century B.C. such names as Themistocles and Pericles in government, Phidias and Myron in art, Herodotus and Thucydides in historical narrative, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in tragic drama, and Aristophanes in comedy, graced Athens.

[2] With the Greeks, morality and the future life never had any connection.

[3] The early Greek philosophers tried to explain the physical world about them by trying to discover what they called the "first principle," from which all else had been derived. Thales (c. 624-548 B.C.), the father of Greek science, had concluded that water was the original source of all matter; Anaximenes (c. 588-524 B.C.), that air was the first principle; Herac.l.i.tes (c. 525-475 B.C.), fire; and Pythagoras (c. 580-500 B.C.), number.

[4] "There was now demanded ability to discuss all sorts of social, political, economic, and scientific or metaphysical questions; to argue in public in the marketplace or in the law courts; to declaim in a formal manner on almost any topic; to amuse or even instruct the populace upon topics of interest or questions of the day; to take part in the many diplomatic emba.s.sies and political missions of the times--the ability, in fact, to shine in a democratic society much like our own and to control the votes and command the approval of an intelligent populace where the function of printing-press, telegraph, railroad, and all modern means of communication were performed through public speech and private discourse, and where the legal, ecclesiastical, and other professional cla.s.ses of teachers did not exist." (Monroe, Paul, _History of Education_, pp. 109- 10.)

[5] The importance of a political career in the new Athens will be better understood if we remember that the influence on public opinion to-day exerted by the pulpit, bar, public platform, press, and scholar was then concentrated in the public speaker, and that the careers now open to promising youths in science, industry, commerce, politics, and government were then concentrated in the political career. It must also be remembered that the Greeks had always been a nation of speakers, both the content and the form of the address being important.

[6] Each of these philosophers proposed an ideal educational system designed to remedy the evils of the State. Xenophon (c.410-362 B.C.), in his _Cyropaedia_, purporting to describe the education of Cyrus of Persia, proposed a Spartan modification of the old Athenian system. Plato (429-348 B.C.), in his _Republic_, proposed an aristocratic socialism as a means of securing individual virtue and state justice. He first presents the super- civic man, an ideal destined for great usefulness among the Christians later on. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), in his _Ethics_, and in his _Politics_, outlined an ideal state and a system of education for it.

[7] "It is beyond all conception what that man espied, saw, beheld, remarked, observed." (Goethe.)

"One of the richest and most comprehensive geniuses that has ever appeared--a man beside whom no age has an equal to place." (Hegel.)

"Aristotle, Nature's private secretary, dipping his pen in intellect."

(Eusebius.)

[8] "As Alexander pa.s.sed conquering through Asia, he restored to the East, as garnered grain, that Greek civilization whose seeds had long ago been received from the East. Each conqueror in turn, the Macedonian and the Roman bowed before conquered Greece and learnt lessons at her feet."

(Butcher, S. H., _Some Aspects of the Greek Genius_, p. 43.)

[9] Webster, D. H., _Ancient History_, p. 302.

[10] Previous to this, paper had been made from the papyrus plant, but Egypt, having forbidden its export, necessity again became the mother of invention.

[11] With this exception, never before the Italian Renaissance was there such interest in collecting books. Almost every book written in antiquity was gathered here, and the library at Alexandria became the British Museum or the Bibliotheque Nationale of the ancient world. Every book entering Egypt was required to be brought to this library.

[12] He founded the science of geography. Before his time Greek students had concluded that the world was round, instead of flat, as stated in the Homeric poems. By careful measurements he determined its size, within a few thousand miles of its actual circ.u.mference, and predicted that one might sail from Spain to the Indies along the same parallel of lat.i.tude.

[13] From the tradition that seventy scholars labored on it.

[14] Henry Sumner Maine.