Engineering, agriculture, and modern medicine stand as three of the great

applications of modern science to human affairs, and as three of the most

important and costly additions to state educational effort made since the

time when nations began to accept the political philosophy of the

eighteenth-century reformers and to take over the school from the Church,

because by so doing the interests of the State could better be advanced

thereby.

III. VOCATIONAL

WHAT IS VOCATIONAL EDUCATION? In a certain sense, all education is

vocational, in that it aims to prepare one for some vocation in life. In

Greece and Rome education was vocational, in that it prepared one to be a

citizen in the State. During the Middle Ages education was to prepare for

a vocation in the Church. Later the vocation of a scholar appeared, and

still later that of a gentleman. In modern times a large range of state

services have been opened up as vocations. Since the beginning of the

nineteenth century, with the extension of educational advantages to

increasing numbers of the people, preparation for more intelligent living

and citizenship have come to be new motives in education. To-day we no

longer use the term vocational education in this rather general sense, but

restrict its use to the specific training of individuals for some useful

employment. Training for law, medicine, the ministry, teaching,

engineering, scientific agriculture, nursing, and commerce are examples of

vocational education in its higher ranges. The development of education

along these lines has previously been described. In this division of this

chapter we shall use the term in a still more common and still more

restricted sense, as meaning the training of the younger people of a State

to do well certain specific things, by teaching them processes and the

practical applications of knowledge, chiefly science and art, to the work

of the vocation they expect to follow to earn their living. The Report of

the American Commission on National Aid to Vocational Education (1914)

defined vocational education (p. 16) as follows:

Wherever the term "vocational education" is used in this

_Report_, it will mean, unless otherwise explained, that form of

education whose controlling purpose is to give training of a secondary

grade to persons over fourteen years of age, for increased efficiency

in useful employment in the trades and industries, in agriculture, in

commerce and commercial pursuits, and in callings based upon a

knowledge of home economics. The occupations included under these are

almost endless in number and variety.

THE NEED FOR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION. Used in this sense vocational education

is an application of technical knowledge, worked out in the higher

schools, to the ordinary vocations of a modern industrial world. As such

it is a product of the Industrial Revolution and the breakdown of the age-

old system of apprenticeship training, [13] and represents another of the

important recent extensions of educational advantages to the masses of the

people who labor with their hands to earn their daily bread.

Besides further democratizing education by extending its advantages to

those who work in the shop and the office and on the farm, vocational

education tends to correct many of the evils of modern industrial life. It

puts the worker in possession of a great body of scientific knowledge

relating to his work which shops and offices cannot give, and it keeps

him, for several years after he becomes a wage earner and at a very

impressionable period of his life, under the directing care of the school.

It thus tends "to counteract the specialization and routine of the

workshop, which wears out his body before nature has completed its

development in form and power, blunts the intelligence which the school

had tried to awaken, shrivels up his heart and imagination, and destroys

his spirit of work."

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES. For almost half a

century the leading nations of western Europe, in an effort to readjust

their age-old apprenticeship system of training to modern conditions of

manufacture, and to develop new national prestige and strength, have given

careful attention to the education of such of their children as were

destined for the vocations of the industrial world. Germany, Austria,

Switzerland, and France have been leaders, with Germany most prominent of

all. [14] No small part of the great progress made by that country in

securing world-wide trade, [15] before the World War, was due to the

extensive and thorough system of vocational education worked out for

German youths (R. 371). In commercial education, too, the Germans, up to

1914, led the world. Even more, they were the only great national group

which had done much to develop commercial training. Next to Germany

probably came the United States. The marked economic progress of

Switzerland during the past quarter-century has likewise been due in large

part to that type of education which would enable her, by skillful

artisanship, to make the most of her very limited resources France has

profited greatly, during the past half-century also, from vocational

education along the lines of agriculture and industrial art. In Denmark,

agricultural education has remade the nation (R. 370), since the days of

its humiliation and spoliation at the hands of Prussia. England, though

keenly sensitive to German trade competition, made only very moderate

efforts in the direction of vocational education until Germany plunged the

world in war in an effort more quickly to dominate commercially. Now, in

the Fisher Education Act of 1918 (p. 649), England has $t last laid

foundations for a great national system of vocational education. Japan,

also, recently laid large plans for a national system of vocational

training.

[Illustration: FIG. 233. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TRADES IN MODERN INDUSTRY

Under the old conditions of apprenticeship a boy learned all the processes

and became a tailor. To-day, in a thoroughly organized clothing factory,

thirty-nine different persons perform different specialized operations in

the manufacture of a coat.]

In the United States but little attention was given to educating young

people for the vocations of life until about 1905-10, though modern

manufacturing conditions had before this largely destroyed the old

apprenticeship type of training. Endowed with enormous natural resources;

not being pressed for the means of subsistence by a rapidly expanding

population on a limited land area; able to draw on Europe for both cheap

manual labor and technically educated workers; largely isolated and self-

sufficient as a nation; lacking a merchant marine; not being thrown into

severe competition for international trade; and able to sell its products

[16] to nations anxious to buy them and willing to come for them in their

own ships; the people of the United States did not, up to recently, feel

any particular need for anything other than a good common-school education

or a general high-school education for their workers. The commercial

course in the high school, the manual-training schools and courses, and

some instruction in drawing and creative art were felt to be about all

that it was necessary to provide.

THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON VOCATIONAL EDUCATION. Largely since 1910, due

in part to expanding world commerce and increasing competition in world

trade; in part to a national realization that the battles of the future

are to be largely commercial battles; and in part to the dawning upon the

American people of the conception, first thought out and put into practice

by Imperial Germany (R. 371), that that nation will triumph in foreign

trade, with all that such triumph means to-day in terms of the happiness

and welfare of its citizenship (R. 372), which puts the greatest amount of

skill and brains into what it produces and sells.

After a number of sporadic efforts in different parts of the country, [17]

and the introduction of a number of bills into Congress which failed to

secure passage, the favorite English plan was followed and a Presidential

Commission was appointed (1913) to inquire into the matter, and to report

on the desirability and feasibility of some form of national aid to

stimulate the development of vocational education. The Commission made its

report in 1914, and submitted a plan for gradually increasing national aid

to the States to assist them in developing and maintaining what will

virtually become a national system of agricultural, trade, commercial, and

home-economics education.

THE COMMISSION'S FINDINGS. The Commission found that there were, in 1910,

in round numbers, 12,500,000 persons engaged in agriculture in the United

States, of whom not over one per cent had had any adequate preparation for

farming; and that there were 14,250,000 persons engaged in manufacturing

and mechanical pursuits, not one per cent of whom had had any opportunity

for adequate training. [18] In the whole United States there were fewer

trade schools, of all kinds, than existed in the little German kingdom of

Bavaria, a State about the size of South Carolina; while the one Bavarian

city of Munich, a city about the size of Pittsburgh, had more trade

schools than were to be found in all the larger cities of the United

States, put together. The Commission further found that there were

25,000,000 persons in the nation, eighteen years of age or over, engaged

in farming, mining, manufacturing, and mechanical pursuits, and in trade

and transportation, and of these the _Report_ said:

If we assume that a system of vocational education, pursued through

the years of the past, would have increased the wage-earning capacity

of each of these persons to the extent of only ten cents a day, this

would have made an increase of wages for the group of $2,500,000 a

day, or $750,000,000 a year, with all that this would mean to the

wealth and life of the nation.

This is a very moderate estimate, and the facts would probably show a

difference between the earning power of the vocationally trained and

the vocationally untrained of at least twenty-five cents a day. This

would indicate a waste of wages, through lack of training, amounting

to $6,250,000 every day, or $1,875,000,000 for the year.

[Illustration: FIG. 234. SCHOOL ATTENDANCE OF AMERICAN CHILDREN, FOURTEEN

TO TWENTY YEARS or AGE

Based on an estimate made by the United States Bureau of Education in 1907

(Bulletin No. 1, p. 29), and based on conditions then existing, but

probably still approximately true. In evening schools all classes were

counted--public, private, Y.M.C.A., Y.W.C.A., etc. Public and private day

schools, both elementary and secondary, also were counted.]

The Commission estimated that a million new young people were required

annually by our industries, and that it would need three years of

vocational education, beyond the elementary-school age, to prepare them

for efficient service. This would require that three million young people

of elementary-school age be continually enrolled in schools offering some

form of vocational training. This was approximately three times the number

of young people then enrolled in all public and private high schools in

the United States, and following any kind of a course of study. In

addition, the untrained adult workers then in farming and industry also

needed some form of adult or extension education to enable them to do more

effective work. The Commission further pointed out that there were in the

United States, in 1910, 7,220,298 young people between the ages of

fourteen and eighteen years, only 1,032,461 of whom were enrolled in a

high school of any type, public or private, day or evening (Fig. 234), and

few of those enrolled were pursuing studies of a technical type.

AMERICAN BEGINNINGS; MEANING OF THE WORK. In 1917 the American Congress

made the beginnings of what is destined to develop rapidly into a truly

national system of vocational education for the boys and girls of

secondary-school age in the United States. This new addition to the

systems of public instruction now provided is one which in time will bring

returns out of all proportion to its costs. Without it the national

prosperity and happiness would be at stake, and the position the United

States has attained in the markets of the world could not possibly be

maintained (R. 372).

This new American legislation is based on the best continental European

experience, and is somewhat typical of recent national legislation for

similar objects elsewhere. It is to include vocational training for

agriculture, the trades and industries, commerce, and home economics. [19]

A certain portion of the money appropriated annually by the national

government is to be used for making or coöperating in studies and

investigations as to needs and courses in agriculture, home economics,

trades, industries, and commerce. The courses must be given in the public

schools; must be for those over fourteen years of age and of less than

college grade; and must be primarily intended for those who are preparing

to enter or who have entered (part-time classes) a trade or a useful

industrial pursuit.

As nation after nation becomes industrialized, as all except the smallest

and poorest nations are bound to become in time, vocational education for

its workers in the field, shop, and office will be found to be another

state necessity. Only the State can adequately provide this, for only the

State can finance or properly organize and integrate the work of so large

and so important an undertaking. Though costly, this new extension of

state educational effort will be found to be a wise business investment

for every industrial and commercial nation. Considered nationally, the

workers of any nation not provided with vocational education will find

themselves unable to compete with the workers of other nations which do

provide such specialized training.

IV. SOCIOLOGICAL

A NEW ESTIMATE AS TO THE VALUE OF CHILD LIFE. As we saw in chapter XVIII,

which described the opportunities for and the kind of schooling developed

up to the middle of the eighteenth century, but little of what may be

called formal education had been provided up to then for the great mass of

children, even in the most progressive nations. We also noted the extreme

brutality of the school. Such was the history of childhood, so far as it

may be said to have had a history at all, up to the rise of the great

humanitarian movement early in the nineteenth century. [20] Neglect,

abuse, mutilation, excessive labor, heavy punishments, and often virtual

slavery awaited children everywhere up to recent times. The sufferings of

childhood at home were added to by others in the school (p. 455) for such

as frequented these institutions.

After the coming of mills and manufacturing the lot of children became,

for a time, worse than before. The demand for cheap labor led to the

apprenticing of children to the factories to tend machines, instead of to

a master to learn a trade, and there they became virtual slaves and their

treatment was most inhuman. [21] Conditions were worse in England than

elsewhere, not because the English were more brutal than the French or the

Germans, but because the Industrial Revolution began earlier in England

and before the rise of humanitarian influences. England was a

manufacturing nation decades before France, and longer still before

Germany. By the time Germany had changed from an agricultural to a

manufacturing nation (after 1871), the new humanitarianism and new

economic conditions had placed a new value on child life and child

welfare.

Since about 1850 an entirely new estimate has come to be placed on the

importance of national attention to child welfare, though the beginnings

of the change date back much earlier. As we have seen (p. 325), England

early began to care for the children of its poor. In the Poor-Relief and

Apprenticeship Law of 1601 (R. 174) England organized into law the growing

practice of a century (p. 326) and laid the basis for much future work of

importance. In this legislation, as we have seen, the foundations of the

Massachusetts school law of 1642 were laid. In the Virginia laws of 1643

and 1646 (R. 200 a) and the Massachusetts law of 1660, providing for the

apprenticeship of orphans and homeless children, the beginnings of child-

welfare work in the American Colonies were made.

Many of the Catholic religious orders in Europe had for long cared for and

brought up poor and neglected children, and in 1729 the first private

orphanage in the new world was established by the Ursulines (p. 346) in

New Orleans. The first public orphanage in America was established in

Charleston, South Carolina, in 1790; the first in England at Birmingham,

in 1817, and in 1824 the New York House of Refuge was founded. The latter

was the forerunner of the juvenile reformatory institutions established

later by practically all of the American States. These have developed

chiefly since 1850. To-day most of the American States and governments in

many other lands also provide state homes for orphan and neglected

children, where they are clothed, fed, cared for, educated, and trained

for some useful employment.

CHILD-LABOR LEGISLATION. One of the best evidences of the new nineteenth-

century humanitarianism is to be found in the large amount of child-labor

legislation which arose, largely after 1850, and which has been

particularly prominent since 1900.

Under the earlier agricultural conditions and the restricted demand for

education for ordinary life needs, child labor was not especially harmful,

as most of it was out of doors and under reasonably good health

conditions. With the coming of the factory system, the rise of cities and

the city congestion of population, and other evils connected with the

Industrial Revolution, the whole situation was changed. Humanitarians now

began to demand legislation to restrict the evils that had arisen. This

demand arose earliest in England, and resulted in the earliest legislation

there.

The year 1802 is important in the history of child-welfare work for the

enactment, by the English Parliament, of the first law to regulate the

employment of children in factories. This was known as the Health and

Morals of Apprentices Act (R. 373). This Act, though largely ineffectual

at the time, ordered important reforms which aroused public opinion and

which later bore important fruit. By it the employment of work-house

orphans was limited; it forbade the labor of children under twelve, for

more than twelve hours a day; provided that night labor of children should

be discontinued, after 1804; ordered that the children so employed must be

taught reading and writing and ciphering, be instructed in religion one

hour a week, be taken to church every Sunday, and be given one new suit of

clothes a year; ordered separate sleeping apartments for the two sexes,

and not over two children to a bed; and provided for the registration and

inspection of factories. This law represents the beginnings of modern

child-labor legislation. It was 1843 before any further child-labor

legislation of importance was enacted, and 1878 before a comprehensive

child-labor bill was finally passed. In the United States the first laws

regulating the employment of children and providing for their school

attendance were enacted by Rhode Island in 1840, and Massachusetts in

1842. Factory legislation in other countries has been a product of more

recent forces and times.

To-day important child-labor legislation has been enacted by all

progressive nations, and the leading world nations have taken advanced

ground on the question. All recent thinking is opposed to children

engaging in productive labor. With the rise of organized labor, and the

extension of the suffrage to the laboring man, he has joined the

humanitarians in opposition to his children being permitted to labor. From

an economic point of view also, all recent studies have shown the

unprofitableness of child labor and the large money-value, under present

industrial conditions, of a good education. As a result of much agitation

and the spread of popular education, it has at last come to be a generally

accepted principle (R. 374) that it is better for children and better for

society that they should remain in school until they are at least fourteen

years of age, and be specially trained for some useful type of work. Shown

to be economically unprofitable, and for long morally indefensible, child

labor is now rapidly being superseded by suitable education and the

vocational training and guidance of youth in all progressive nations.

COMPULSORY SCHOOL-ATTENDANCE LEGISLATION. The natural corollary of the

taxation of the wealth of the State to educate the children of the State,

and the prohibition of children to labor, is the compulsion of children to

attend school that they may receive the instruction and training which the

State has deemed it wise to tax its citizens to provide.

Except in the German States, compulsory education is a relatively recent

idea, though in its origins it is a child of the Protestant Reformation

theory as to education for salvation. Luther and his followers had stood

for the education of all, supported by (R. 156) and enforced by (R. 158)

the State. This idea of the education of all to read the Bible took deep

root, as we have seen, with both Lutherans and Calvinists. In 1619 the

little Duchy of Weimar made the school attendance of all children, six to

twelve years of age, compulsory, and the same idea was instituted in Gotha

by Duke Ernest (p. 317), in 1642; the same year that the Massachusetts

General Court ordered the Selectmen of the towns to ascertain if parents

and the masters of apprentices (R. 190) were training their children "in

learning and labor" and "to read and understand the principles of religion

and the capital laws of the country." This latter law is remarkable in

that, for the first time in the English-speaking world, a legislative body

representing the State ordered that all children should be taught to read.

Five years later (1647) the Massachusetts Court ordered the establishment

of schools (R. 191) better to enforce the compulsion, and thus laid the

foundations upon which the American public-school systems have since been

built. In Holland, the Synod of Dort (1618) had tried to institute the

idea of compulsory education (R. 176), and in 1646 the Scotch Parliament

had ordered the compulsory establishment of schools (R. 179).

In German lands the compulsory-attendance idea took deep root, and in

consequence the Germans were the first important modern nation to enforce,

thoroughly, the education of all. In 1717 King Frederick William I issued

(p. 555) the first compulsory-education law for Prussia, ordering that

"hereafter wherever there are schools in the place the parents shall be

obliged, under severe penalties, to send their children to school,...

daily in winter, but in summer at least twice a week." He further ordered

that the fees for the poor were to be paid "from the community's funds."

Finally Frederick the Great organized the earlier procedure into

comprehensive codes, and made (1763, R. 274, Section 10; 1765, R. 275 d)

detailed provisions relating to the compulsion to attend the schools. In

the Code of 1794 (p. 565) the final legislative step was taken when it was

ordered that "the instruction in school must be continued until the child

is found to possess the knowledge necessary to every rational being." By

the middle of the eighteenth century the basis was clearly laid in Prussia

for that enforcement of the compulsion to attend schools which, by the

middle of the nineteenth century, had become such a notable characteristic

of all German education. The same compulsory idea early took deep root

among the Scandinavian peoples. In consequence the lowest illiteracy in

Europe, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was to be found (see

map, p. 714) among the Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Germans.

The compulsory-attendance idea died out in America, in the Netherlands,

and in part in Scotland. In England and in the Anglican Colonies in

America it never took root. In France the idea awaited the work of the

National Convention, which (1792) ordered three years of education

compulsory for all. War and the lack of interest of Napoleon in primary

education caused the requirement, however, to become a dead letter. The

Law of 1833 provided for but did not enforce it, and real compulsory

education in France did not come until 1882. In England the compulsory

idea received but little attention until after 1870, met with much

opposition, and only recently have comprehensive reforms been provided. In

the United States the new beginnings of compulsory-attendance legislation

date from the Rhode Island child-labor law of 1840, and the first modern

compulsory-attendance law enacted by Massachusetts, in 1852. By 1885,

fourteen American States and six Territories had enacted some form of

compulsory-attendance law. Since 1900 there has been a general revision of

American state legislation on the subject, with a view to increasing and

the better enforcement of the compulsory-attendance requirements, and with

a general demand that the National Congress should enact a national child-

labor law.

As a result of this legislation the labor of young children has been

greatly restricted; work in many industries has been prohibited entirely,

because of the danger to life and health; compulsory education has been

extended in a majority of the American States to cover the full school

year; poverty, or dependent parents, in many States no longer serves as an

excuse for non-attendance; often those having physical or mental defects

also are included in the compulsion to attend, if their wants can be

provided for; the school census has been changed so as to aid in the

location of children of compulsory school-attendance age; and special

officers have been authorized or ordered appointed to assist school

authorities in enforcing the compulsory-attendance and child-labor laws.

Having taxed their citizens to provide schools, the different States now

require children to attend and partake of the advantages provided. The

schools, too, have made a close study of retarded pupils, because of the

close connection found to exist between retardation in school and truancy

and juvenile delinquency.

ONE RESULT OF THIS LEGISLATION. One of the results of all this legislation

has been to throw, during the past quarter of a century, an entirely new

burden on schools everywhere. Such legislation has brought into the

schools not only the truant and the incorrigible, who under former

conditions either left early or were expelled, but also many children who

have no aptitude for book learning, and many of inferior mental qualities

who do not profit by ordinary classroom procedure. Still more, they have

brought into the school the crippled, tubercular, deaf, epileptic, and

blind, as well as the sick, needy, and physically unfit. By steadily

raising the age at which children may leave school, from ten or twelve up

to fourteen and sixteen, schools everywhere have come to contain many

children who, having no natural aptitude for study, would at once, unless

specially handled, become a nuisance in the school and tend to demoralize

schoolroom procedure. These laws have thrown upon the school a new burden

in the form of public expectancy for results, whereas a compulsory-

education law cannot create capacity to profit from education. Under the

earlier educational conditions the school, unable to handle or educate

such children, dealt with them much as the Church of the time dealt with

religious delinquents. It simply expelled them or let them drop from

school, and no longer concerned itself about them. To-day the public

expects the school to retain and get results with them. Consequently,

within the past twenty-five years the whole attitude of the school toward

such children has undergone a change; many different kinds of classes and

courses, that might serve better to handle them, have been introduced; and

an attempt has been made to salvage them and turn back to society as many

of them as possible, trained for some form of social and personal

usefulness.

THE EDUCATION OF DEFECTIVES. Another nineteenth-century expansion of state

education has come in the provision now generally made for the education

of defectives. To-day the state school systems of Christian nations

generally make some provision for state institutional care, and often for

local classes as well, for the training of children who belong to the

seriously defective classes of society. This work is almost entirely a

product of the new humanitarianism of modern times. Excepting the

education of the deaf, seriously begun a little earlier, all effective

work dates from the first half of the nineteenth century. At first the

feasibility of all such instruction was doubted, and the work generally

was commenced privately. Out of successes thus achieved, public

institutions have been built up to carry on, on a large scale, what was

begun privately on a small scale. It is now felt to be better for the

State, as well as for the unfortunates themselves, that they be cared for

and educated, as suitably and well as possible, for self-respect, self-

support, and some form of social and vocational usefulness. In

consequence, the compulsory-attendance laws of the leading world States

to-day require that defectives, between certain ages at least, be sent to

a state institution or be enrolled in a public-school class specialized

for their training.

[Illustration: FIG. 235. ABBÉ DE L'ÉPÉE (1712-89)]

BEGINNINGS OF THE WORK. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century a

number of private efforts at the education of the deaf are on record, all

dating however from the pioneer work of a Spanish Benedictine, in 1578. In

1760 a new era in the education of the deaf was begun when Abbé de l'Épée

opened a school at Paris for the oral instruction of poor deaf mutes, and

Thomas Braidwood (1715-1806) began similar work at Edinburgh. A few years

later (1778) a third school was opened at Leipzig. This last was

established under the patronage of the Elector of Saxony, and was the

first school of its kind in the world to receive government recognition.

The Paris school was taken over as a state institution by the Constituent

Assembly, in 1791. In England the instruction of the deaf remained a

private and a family monopoly until 1819. In 1817 the first school in

America was opened, at Hartford, Connecticut, by the Reverend Thomas H.

Gallaudet, and Massachusetts, in 1819, sent the first pupils paid for at

state expense to this institution. In 1823 Kentucky created the first

state school for the training of the deaf established in the new world,

and Ohio the second, in 1827.

[Illustration: FIG. 236. REV. THOMAS H. GALLAUDET TEACHING THE DEAF AND

DUMB

From a bas-relief on the monument of Gallaudet, erected by the deaf and

dumb of the United States, in the grounds of the American Asylum, at

Hartford, Connecticut.]

The education of the blind began in France, in 1784; England, in 1791;

Austria, in 1804; Prussia, in 1806; Holland, in 1808; Sweden, in 1810;

Denmark, in 1811; Scotland, in 1812; in Boston and New York, in 1832; and

in Philadelphia, in 1833. All were private institutions, and general

interest in the education of the blind was awakened later by exhibiting

the pupils trained. The first book for the blind was printed in Paris, in

1786. The first kindergarten for the blind was established in Germany, in

1861; the first school for the colored blind, by North Carolina, in 1869.

[Illustration: FIG. 237. EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS MAINTAINED BY THE STATE

As state institutions, other than public schools.]

Before the nineteenth century the feeble-minded and idiotic were the

laughing-stock of society, and no one thought of being able to do anything

for them. In 1811 Napoleon ordered a census of such individuals, and in

1816 the first school for their training was opened at Salzburg, Austria.

The school was unsuccessful, and closed in 1835. The real beginning of the

training of the feeble-minded was made in France, by Edouard Séguin, "The

Apostle of the Idiot," in 1837, when he began a life-long study of such

defectives. By 1845 three or four institutions had been opened in

Switzerland and Great Britain for their study and training, and for a time

an attempt was made to effect cures. Gallaudet had tried to educate such

children at Hartford, about 1820, and a class for idiots was established

at the Blind Asylum in Boston, in 1848. The interest thus aroused led to

the creation of the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded

Youth, in 1851, the first institution of its kind in the United States. In

1867 the first city school class to train children of low-grade

intelligence was organized in Germany, and all the larger cities of

Germany later organized such special classes. Norway followed with a

similar city organization, in 1874; and England, Switzerland, and Austria,

about 1892. The first American city to organize such classes was

Providence, Rhode Island, in 1893. Since that time special classes for

children of low-grade mentality have become a common feature of the large

city school systems in most American cities.

In 1832 the first attempt to educate crippled children, as such, was made

in Munich. The model school in Europe for the education of cripples was

established in Copenhagen, in 1872. The work was begun privately in New

York City, in 1861, and first publicly in Chicago, in 1899. The London

School Board first began such classes in England, in 1898.

Dependents, orphans, children of soldiers and sailors, and incorrigibles

of various classes represent others for whom modern States have now

provided special state institutions. To-day a modern State finds it

necessary to provide a number of such specialized institutions, or to make

arrangements with neighboring States for the care of its dependents, if it

is to meet what have come to be recognized as its humanitarian educational

duties. The more important of these special state institutions are shown

in the diagram given in Fig. 237.

Public playgrounds and play directors, vacation schools, juvenile courts,

disciplinary classes, parental schools, classes for mothers, visiting

home-teachers and nurses, and child-welfare societies and officers, are

other means for caring for child life and child welfare which have all

been begun within the past half-century. The significance of these

additions lies chiefly in that the history of the attitude of nations

toward their child life is the history of the rise of humanitarianism,

altruism, justice, order, morality, and civilization itself.

THE EDUCATION OF SUPERIOR CHILDREN. All the work described above and

relating to the work of defectives, delinquents, and children for some

reason in need of special attention and care has been for those who

represent the less capable and on the whole less useful members of

society--the ones from whom society may expect the least. They are at the

same time the most costly wards of the State.

Wholly within the second decade of the present century, and largely as a

result of the work of the French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857-1911) we

are now able to sort out, for special attention, a new class of what are

known as superior, or gifted children, and to the education of these

special attention is to-day here and there beginning to be directed.

Educationally, it is an attempt to do for democratic forms of national

organization what a two-class school system does for monarchical forms,

but to select intellectual capacity from the whole mass of the people,

rather than from a selected class or caste. We know now that the number of

children of superior ability is approximately as large as the number of

the feeble in mind, and also that the future of democratic governments

hinges largely upon the proper education and utilization of these superior

children. One child of superior intellectual capacity, educated so as to

utilize his talents, may confer greater benefits upon mankind, and be

educationally far more important, than a thousand of the feeble-minded

children upon whom we have recently come to put so much educational effort

and expense. Questions relating to the training of leaders for democracy's

service attain new significance in terms of the recent ability to measure

and grade intelligence, as also do questions relating to grading,

classification in school, choice of studies, rate of advancement, and the

vocational guidance of children in school.

_Net Average Worth of a Person_

_Age_ _Worth_

0 $90

5 950

10 2000

20 4000

30 4100

40 3650

50 2900

60 1650

70 15

80 -700

(Calculations by Dr. William Farr, formerly Registrar of Vital

Statistics for Great Britain. Based on pre-war values.)

THE NEW INTEREST IN HEALTH. Another new expansion of the educational

service which has come in since the middle of the nineteenth century, and

which has recently grown to be one of large significance, is work in the

medical inspection of schools, the supervision of the health of pupils,

and the new instruction in preventive hygiene. This is a product of the

scientific and social and industrial revolutions which the nineteenth

century brought, rather than of humanitarian influences, and represents an

application of newly discovered scientific knowledge to health work among

children. Its basis is economic, though its results are largely physical

and educational and social (R. 375).

The discovery and isolation of bacteria; the vast amount of new knowledge

which has come to us as to the transmission and possibilities for the

elimination of many diseases; the spread of information as to sanitary

science and preventive medicine; the change in emphasis in medical

practice, from curative to preventive and remedial; the closer crowding

together of all classes of people in cities; the change of habits for many

from life in the open to life in the factory, shop, and apartment; and the

growing realization of the economic value to the nation of its manhood and

womanhood; have all alike combined with modern humanitarianism and applied

Christianity to make progressive nations take a new interest in child

health and proper child development. European nations have so far done

much more in school health work than has the United States, though a very

commendable beginning has been made here.

MEDICAL INSPECTION AND HEALTH SUPERVISION. Medical inspection of schools

began in France, in 1837, though genuine medical inspection, in a modern

sense, was not begun in France until 1879. The pioneer country for real

work was Sweden, where health officers were assigned to each large school

as early as 1868. Norway made such appointments optional in 1885, and

obligatory in 1891. Belgium began the work in 1874. Tests of eyesight were

begun in Dresden in 1867. Frankfort-on-Main appointed the first German

school physician in 1888. England first employed school nurses in 1887;

and, in 1907, following the revelations as to low physical vitality

growing out of the Boer War, adopted a mandatory medical-inspection and

health-development act applying to England and Wales, and the year

following Scotland did the same. Argentine and Chili both instituted such

service in 1888, and Japan made medical inspection compulsory and

universal in 1898.

In the United States the work was begun voluntarily in Boston, in 1894,

following a series of epidemics. Chicago organized medical inspection in

1895, New York City in 1897, and Philadelphia in 1898. From these larger

cities the idea spread to the smaller ones, at first slowly, and then very

rapidly. The first school nurse in the United States was employed in New

York City, in 1902, and the idea at once proved to be of great value. In

1906 Massachusetts adopted the first state medical inspection law. In 1912

Minnesota organized the first "State Division of Health Supervision of

Schools" in the United States, and this plan has since been followed by

other States.

From mere medical inspection to detect contagious diseases, in which the

movement everywhere began, it was next extended to tests for eyesight and

hearing, to be made by teachers or physicians, and has since been enlarged

to include physical examinations to detect hidden diseases and a

constructive health-program for the schools. The work has now come to

include eye, ear, nose, throat, and teeth, as well as general physical

examinations; the supervision of the teaching of hygiene in the schools,

and to a certain extent the physical training and playground activities;

and a constructive program for the development of the health and physical

welfare of all children. All this represents a further extension of the

public-education idea.

V. THE SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATION OF EDUCATION

An important recent development in the field of public education, and in a

sense an outgrowth of all the preceding recent development which we have

described, has been the organization of collegiate and university

instruction in the history, theory, practice, and administration of

education. Still more recent has been the organization of Teachers'

Colleges and Schools of Education to give advanced training in educational

research and in the solution of the practical problems of school

organization and administration. So important has this recent development

become that no history of educational progress would be complete without

at least a brief mention of this recent attempt to give scientific

organization to the educational process.

EARLY BEGINNERS. Though the teachers' seminaries had been organized in

Germany and other northern lands toward the close of the eighteenth

century, the normal school in France early in the nineteenth, and the

training-college in England and the normal school in the United States by

the close of the first third of that century, the work in these remained

for a long time almost entirely academic in nature and elementary in

character. This was also true of the superior normal school for training

teachers for the _lycées_ of France.

The reason for this is easy to find. The writings of the earlier

educational reformers were little known; the contributions of Herbart and

Froebel had not as yet been popularized; there was no organized psychology

of the educational process, and no psychology better than that of John

Locke; the detailed Pestalozzian procedure had not as yet been worked out

in the form of teaching technique; the history of the development of

educational theory or of educational practice had not been written; and

almost no philosophy of the educational purpose had been formulated which

could be used in the training-schools. In consequence the training of

teachers, both for elementary and secondary instruction, [22] was almost

entirely in academic subjects, with some talks on school-keeping and class

organization and management added, and at times a little philosophy as to

educational work, such as habit-formation, morality, thinking, and the

training of the will. Educational journalism did not begin in either

Europe or America until near the close of the first quarter of the

nineteenth century, and it was 1850 before it attained any significance,

and 1840 to 1850 before any important pedagogical literature arose. [23]

[Illustration: FIG. 238. KARL GEORG VON RAUMER (1783-1865)]

NEW INFLUENCE. In 1843 there appeared, in Germany, the first two volumes

of a very celebrated and influential History of Education, by a professor

of mineralogy in the University of Erlangen, by the name of Karl Gcorg von

Raumer. As a young man in Paris (1808-09), studying the great mineral

collections found there, he read and was deeply stirred by Fichte's

"Address to the German Nation" (p. 567). As a result he went to Yverdon,

in 1809, and spent some months in studying the work in Pestalozzi's

Institute. This interest in education he never lost, and thereafter, as

professor of mineralogy at Halle and Erlangen, he also gave lectures on

pedagogy (_Uber Pädagogik_). The outgrowth of these lectures was his four-

volume _History of Pedagogy from the Revival of Classical Studies to our

own Time_. [24] The work was done with characteristic German thoroughness,

and for long served as a standard organization and text on the history of

the development of educational theory and practice since the days of the

Revival of Learning. The work of von Raumer stimulated many to a study of

the writings of the earlier educational reformers, and numerous books and

papers on educational history and theory soon began to appear. Most

important, for American students, was Henry Barnard's monumental _American

Journal of Education_, begun in 1855, and continued for thirty-one years.

This is a great treasure-house of pedagogical literature for American

educators.

After 1850 the organization of a technique of instruction for the

elementary-school subjects took place rapidly, in the normal schools of

all lands, as it had earlier in the German teachers' seminaries. By 1868

the study of the new Herbartian psychology and educational theory was well

under way in Germany, and by 1890 in the United States. By 1875 the

kindergarten, with its new theory of child life, was also beginning to

make itself felt in both Europe and America. Between 1850 and 1875 Weber,

Lotze, Fechner, and Wundt laid the foundations for a new psychology (R.

357), and in 1878 Wundt opened the first laboratory for the experimental

study of psychology at the University of Leipzig. In 1890 William James

published his two-volume work on _Principles of Psychology_, a book so

original and lucid in treatment that it at once gave a new teaching

organization to modern psychology. After about 1880, the extension of

education upward and outward in the United States, and the rapid

development of state school systems which had by that time begun, began to

make new demands for better scientific and legal and administrative

organization, and this gave rise to a new type of educational literature.

After von Raumer's work, probably the greatest single stimulative

influence of the mid-nineteenth century was that exerted by the marked

successes of the Prussian armies in a series of short but very decisive

wars. Against Denmark (1864) and Austria (1866), but in particular in the

Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the Prussian armies proved irresistible.

These military operations attracted new attention to education, and "the

Prussian schoolmaster has triumphed" became a common world saying. This,

coupled with the remarkable national development of United Germany which

almost immediately set in, caused progressive nations to turn to the study

of education with increased interest. The English and Scottish

universities now began to establish lectureships in the theory and history

of education, [25] and the first university chairs in education in the

United States were founded.

THE UNIVERSITY STUDY OF EDUCATION. In no country in the world have the

universities, within the past three decades, given the attention to the

study of Education--a term that in English-speaking lands has replaced the

earlier and more limited "Pedagogy"--that has been given in the United

States. [26] After the United States the newer universities of England

probably come next. Up to 1890 less than a dozen chairs of education had

been established in all the colleges of the United States, and their work

was still largely limited to historical and philosophical studies of

education, and to a type of classroom methodology and school management,

since almost entirely passed over to the normal schools. By 1920 there

were some four hundred colleges in the United States giving serious

courses on educational history and procedure and administration, many of

them maintaining large and important professional Schools of Education for

the more scientific study of the subject, and for the training of leaders

for the service of the nation's schools.

In the great advances which have taken place in the organization of

education, during these three decades, no institution in the world has

exerted a more important influence than has "Teachers College," Columbia

University, in the City of New York, which was organized in 1887 as "The

New York College for the Training of Teachers," but since 1890 has been

affiliated with Columbia University, under its present name. This

institution has been a model copied by many others over the world; has

trained a large percentage of the leaders in education in the United

States; and has been particularly influential with students from England,

the English self-governing dominions, China, and South America.

To-day, in all the state universities and in many non-state institutions

in the United States, we find well-organized Teachers' Colleges engaged in

a work which two decades ago was being attempted by but a few institutions

anywhere, In the municipal universities of England, in Canada, in Japan

and China, and in other democratic lands, we find the beginnings of a

similar development of the scientific study of education. In these Schools

or Colleges for the scientific study of education the best thinking on the

problems of the reorganization and administration of education, and the

most new and creative work, has been and is being done. [27]

THE PROBLEMS OF THE PRESENT. Pestalozzi dreamed that he might be able to

psychologize instruction and reduce all to an orderly procedure, which,

once learned, would make one a master teacher. What he was not able to

accomplish he died thinking others after him would do. The problem of

education has had, with time, no such simple and easy solution. Instead,

with the development of state school systems, the extension of education

in many new directions to meet new needs, and the application to the study

of education of the same scientific methods which have produced such

results in other fields of human knowledge, we have come to-day to have

hundreds of problems, many of which are complex and difficult and which

influence deeply the welfare of society and the State. That these

problems, even with time, will receive any such simple solution as that of

which Pestalozzi dreamed, may well be doubted. In the days of church

control, memoriter instruction, and a school for religious ends, education

was a simple matter; to-day it partakes of the difficulty and complexity

which characterize most of the problems of modern world States. In

consequence of this important change in the character of education a great

number of important problems in educational organization, practice, and

procedure now face us for solution.

Space can here be taken to mention only the more prominent of these

present-day educational problems. On the administrative side is a whole

group of problems relating to forms of organization: the proper

educational relationships between the State and its subordinate units; the

development of a state educational policy: the types of instruction the

State must provide, and compel attendance upon; questions of taxation and

support, compulsory attendance, and child labor; the training and

oversight of teachers for the service of the State; problems of child

health and welfare; the provision of adequate and professional

supervision; the provision of continuation schools, and of industrial and

vocational training; the supervision of school buildings for health and

sanitary control; and the relation of the State to private and parochial

education. The problem of how to produce as effective and as thorough

education for leadership with a one-class school system as with a two-

class; the opening-up of opportunity for youth of brains in any social

class to rise and be trained for service; the selection and proper

training of those of superior intelligence; the elimination of barriers to

the advancement of children of large intellectual endowment; and what best

to do with those of small intellectual capacity, form another important

group of present-day educational problems. Vocational training and

technical education, and the relation and the proper solution of these

questions to national happiness and prosperity and human welfare, form

still another important group. The many questions which hinge upon

instruction; the elimination of useless subject-matter; the best

organization of instruction; proper aims and ends; moral and civic

training; the most economical organization of school work; the saving of

time; and what are desirable educational reorganizations, all these form a

group of instructional problems of large significance for the future of

public education. Still more in detail, but of large importance, are the

questions relating to the scientific measurement of the results of

instruction; the erection of attainable goals in teaching; and the

introduction of scientific accuracy into educational work. Still another

important group of problems relates to the readjustment of inherited

school organization and practices, the better to meet the changed and

changing conditions of national life--social, industrial, political,

religious, economic, scientific--brought about by the industrial and

social and scientific and political revolutions which have taken place.

These represent some of the more important new problems in education which

have come to challenge us since the school was taken over from the Church

and transformed into the great constructive tool of the State. Their

solution will call for careful investigation, experimentation, and much

clear thinking, and before they are solved other new problems will arise.

So probably it will ever be under a democratic form of government; only in

autocratic or strongly monarchical forms of government, where the study of

problems of educational organization and adjustment are not looked upon

with favor, can a school system to-day remain for long fixed in type or

uniform in character. Education to-day has become intricate and difficult,

requiring careful professional training on the part of those who would

exercise intelligent control, and so intimately connected with national

strength and national welfare that it may be truthfully said to have

become, in many respects, the most important constructive undertaking of a

modern State.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Show that education must be extended and increased in efficiency in

proportion as the suffrage is extended, and additional political functions

given to the electorate. Illustrate.

2. Trace the changes in the character of the instruction given in the

schools, paralleling such changes.

3. Explain the difference in use of the schools for nationality ends in

Germany and France.

4. Of what is the recent development of evening, adult, and extension

education an index?

5. Show why university education is more important in national life to-day

than ever before in history.

6. Compare the rate of development of universities during the nineteenth

century, and all time before the nineteenth. Of what is the difference in

rate an index?

7. Explain why Americans have been less successful in introducing science

instruction into their schools than have the Germans. Agriculture than the

French.

8. Explain the breakdown of the old apprenticeship education.

9. Explain the American recent rapid acceptance of the agricultural high

school, whereas the agricultural colleges for a long time faced opposition

and lack of interest and support.

10. Explain the continued emphasis of high-school studies leading to the

professions rather than the vocations, though so small a percentage of

people are needed for professional work.

11. In Germany this was largely regulated by the Government; show how it

would be much easier there than in the United States.

12. Show why European nations would naturally take up vocational training

ahead of the United States, Canada, Australia, or South America.

13. Explain the reasons for the new conceptions as to the value of child

life which have come within the past hundred years, in all advanced

nations. Why not in the less advanced nations?

14. Show the relation between the breakdown of the apprentice system, the

Industrial Revolution, and the rise of compulsory school attendance.

15. Show that compulsory school attendance is a natural corollary to

general taxation for education.

16. How do you account for the relatively recent interest in the education

of defectives and delinquents? Of what is this interest an expression?

17. Does the obligation assumed to educate involve any greater exercise of

state authority or recognition of duty than the advancement of the health

of the people and the sanitary welfare of the State?

18. What additional unsolved problems would you add to the list given on

the preceding page?

SELECTED READINGS

In the accompanying _Book of Readings_ the following selections

illustrative of the contents of this chapter are reproduced:

367. McKechnie, W. S.: The Environmental Influence of the State.

368. Emperor William II.: German Secondary Schools and National Ends.

369. Van Hise, Chas. R.: The University and the State.

370. Friend: What the Folk High Schools have done for Denmark.

371. U.S. Commission: The German System of Vocational Education.

372. U.S. Commission: Vocational Education and National Prosperity.

373. de Montmorency: English Conditions before the First Factory-Labor

Act.

374. Giddings, F. R.: The New Problem of Child Labor.

375. Hoag, E. B., and Terman, L. M.: Health Work in the Schools.

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS

1. Explain why it is now so important that the State properly environ

(367) its youth.

2. What were the actuating motives behind the German Emperor's speech

(368)? Was he right in his position as to the relation of the schools and

national needs and welfare?

3. Explain Van Hise's conception (369) that the university is "The Soul of

the State."

4. Does Denmark form any exception as to what might be done (370) in any

country, such as Russia? Mexico?

5. Show that the results justified the German emphasis (371) on vocational

training. How do you explain this German far-sightedness?

6. What will be the result when many nations (372) become highly skilled?

7. Show the growth of humanitarian influences by contrasting conditions in

England in 1802 (373), and conditions to-day.

8. Would the English 1802 conditions be found in any Christian land today?

Why?

9. Show that the child-labor problem (374) is a product of the Industrial

Revolution.

10. Viewed in the light of history, what would we say of the present

opposition to health work (375) in the schools?

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES

* Allen, E. A. "Education of Defectives"; in Butler, N. M., _Education

in the United States_, pp. 771-820.

Barnard, Henry. _National Education in Europe_.

* _Commission on National Aid to Vocational Education, Report_, vol.

I. (Document 1004, H. R., 63d Congress, 2d session, Washington, 1914.)

Cook, W. A. "A Brief Survey of the Development of Compulsory Education

in the United States"; in _Elementary School Teacher_, vol. 12,

PP. 33l-35 (March, 1912.)

* Dean, A. D. _The Worker and the State_.

Eliot, C. W. _Education for Efficiency_.

Farrington, F. E. _Commercial Education in Germany_.

Foght, H. W. _Rural Denmark and its Schools_.

Friend, L. L. _The Folk High Schools of Denmark_. (Bulletin No. 3,

1914, United States Bureau of Education.)

* Hoag, E. B., and Terman, L. M. _Health Work in the Schools_.

Kandel, I. L, "The Junior High School in European Systems"; in

_Educational Review_, vol. 58, pp. 305-29. (Nov. 1919.)

* Munroe, J. P. _New Demands in Education_.

* Payne, G. H. _The Child in Human Progress_.

Smith, A. T., and Jesien, W. S. _Higher Technical Education in Foreign

Countries_. (Bulletin No. n, 1917, United States Bureau of

Education.)

Snedden, D. S. _Vocational Education_.

* Terman, L. M. _The Intelligence of School Children_.

Waddle, C. W. _Introduction to Child Psychology_, chap. I.

Ware, Fabian. _Educational Foundations of Trade and Industry_.

CONCLUSION; THE FUTURE

We have now reached the end of the story of the rise and progress of man's

conscious effort to improve himself and advance the welfare of his group

by means of education. To one who has followed the narrative thus far it

must be evident how fully this conscious effort has paralleled the history

of the rise and progress of western civilization itself. Beginning first

among the Greeks--the first people in history to be "smitten with the

passion for truth." the first possessing sufficient courage to put faith

in reason, and the first to attempt to reconcile the claims, of the State

and the individual and to work out a plan of "ordered liberty"--a new

spirit was born and in time passed on to the western world. As Butcher

well says (R. 11), "the Greek genius is the European genius in its first

and brightest bloom, and from a vivifying contact with the Greek spirit

Europe derived that new and mighty impulse which we call Progress."

Hellenizing first the Eastern Mediterranean, and then taking captive her

rude conqueror, the Hellenization of the Roman and early Christian world

was the result.

Then followed the reaction under early Christian rule, and the fearful

deluge of barbarism which for centuries well-nigh extinguished both the

ancient learning and the new spirit. Finally, after the long mediaeval

night, came "time's burst of dawn," first and for a long time confined to

Italy, but later extending to all northern lands, and in the century of

revival and rediscovery and reconstruction the Greek passion for truth and

the Greek courage to trust reason were reawakened, and once more made the

heritage of the western world. Once again the Greek spirit, the spirit of

freedom and progress and trust in the power of truth, became the impulse

that was to guide and dominate the future. To follow reason without fear

of consequences, to substitute scientific for empirical knowledge, to

equip men for intelligent participation in civic life, to discover a

rational basis for conduct, to unfold and expand every inborn faculty and

energy, and to fill man with a restless striving after an ideal--these

essentially Greek characteristics in time came to be accepted by an

increasing number of modern men, as they had been by the thoughtful men of

the ancient Greek world, as the law and goal of human endeavor. From this

point on the intellectual progress of the western world was certain,

though at times the rate seems painfully slow.

The great events which stand before, modern history--milestones, as it

were, along the road to the intellectual progress of mankind in the

recovery of the Greek spirit--were the revival of the ancient learning,

the Protestant appeal to reason, the recovery and vast extension of the

old scientific knowledge, the assertion of the rights of the individual as

opposed to the rights of the State, and the growth of a new

humanitarianism, induced by the teachings of Christianity, which has

softened old laws and awakened a new conception of the value of child and

human life. Out of these great historic movements have come modern

scholarship, the inestimable boon of religious liberty, the firm

establishment of the idea of the reign of law in an orderly universe, the

conception of government as in the interests of the governed, the

substitution of democracy and political equality for the rule of a class

or an autocratic power, and the assertion of the right to an education at

public expense as a birthright of every child. The common school, the

education of all, equality of rights and opportunity, full and equal

suffrage, the responsibility of all for the advancement of the common

welfare, and liberty under law have been the natural consequences and the

outcome of these great struggles to set free and quicken the human spirit.

The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which marked the close of a century of

effort to crush human reason and religious liberty with violence and

oppression, marked a turning-point in the history of the world. Though

religious intolerance and bigotry might still persist in places for

centuries to come, this Peace acknowledged the futility of persecution to

stamp out human inquiry, and marked the downfall of intellectual

medievalism. The work of the political philosophers of the eighteenth

century, the establishment of a new political ideal by the leaders of the

American Revolution, and the drastic sweeping-away of ancient abuses in

Church and State in the Revolution in France, applied a new spirit to

government, ushered in the rule of the common man, and began the

establishment of democracy as the ruling form of government for mankind.

The recent World War in Europe was in a sense a sequel to what had gone

before. One result of its outcome, despite certain reactionary but

temporary old-type governments that the near future may see set up in

places, has been the elimination of the mediaeval theory of the "divine

right of kings" from the continent of Europe, and the establishment of the

democratic type of government as the ruling type of the future. Some of

the nations for a time will be in a sense experimental, as shown on the

above map, and even well-governed Germany must learn new forms and ways,

but in time government of and by and for the people is practically certain

to become established everywhere on the continent of Europe.

[Illustration: FIG. 239. THE ESTABLISHED AND EXPERIMENTAL NATIONS OF

EUROPE

The established nations are in white; the experimental nations shaded.

After a time Germany should become white also.]

Still more, the outcome of the World War would seem to indicate that

democratic forms of government are destined in time to extend to peoples

everywhere who have the capacity for using them. The great problem of the

coming century, then, and perhaps even of succeeding centuries, will be to

make democracy a safe form of government for the world. This can be done

only by a far more general extension of educational opportunities and

advantages than the world has as yet witnessed. In the hands of an

uneducated proletariat democracy is a dangerous instrument. In Russia,

Mexico, and in certain of the Central American Republics we see what a

democracy results in in the hands of an uneducated people. There, too

often, the revolver instead of the ballot box is used to settle public

issues, and instead of orderly government under law we have a reign of

injustice and anarchy. Only by the slow but sure means of general

education of the masses in character and in the fundamental bases of

liberty under law can governments that are safe and intelligent be

created. In a far larger sense than anything we have as yet witnessed,

education must become the constructive tool for national progress.

The great needs of the modern world call for the general diffusion among

the masses of mankind of the intellectual and spiritual and political

gains of the centuries, which are as yet, despite the great recent

progress made in extending general education, the possession of but a

relatively small number of the world's population. Among the more

important of these are the religious spirit, coupled with full religious

liberty and tolerance; a clear recognition of the rights of minorities, so

long as they do not impair the advancement of the general welfare; the

general diffusion of a knowledge of the more common truths and

applications of science, particularly as these relate to personal hygiene,

sanitation, agriculture, and modern industrial processes; the general

education of all, not only in the tools of knowledge, but in those

fundamental principles of self-government which lie at the basis of

democratic life; training in character, self-control, and in the ability

to assume and carry responsibility; the instilling into a constantly

widening circle of mankind the importance of fidelity to duty, truth,

honor, and virtue; the emphasis of the many duties and responsibilities

which encompass all in the complex modern world, rather than the

eighteenth-century individualistic conception of political and personal

rights; the clear distinction between liberty and license; and the

conception of liberty guided by law. In addition each man and woman should

be educated for personal efficiency in some vocation or form of service in

which each can best realize his personal possibilities, and at the same

time render the largest service to that society of which he forms a part.

The great needs of the modern world also call for that form of education

and training which will not merely impart literacy and prepare for

economic competence and national citizenship, but which will give to

national groups a new conception of national character and international

morality and create new standards of value for human effort. National

character and international morality are always the outgrowth of the

personality of a people, and this in turn calls for the inculcation of

humane ideals, the proper discipline of the instincts, the training of a

will to do right, good physical vigor, and, to a large degree, the

development of individual efficiency and economic competence. Moral and

religious instruction, as it has been given, will not suffice, because it

does not reach the heart of the problem. No nation has shown more

completely the utter futility of religious instruction to produce morality

than has Germany, where the instruction of all in the principles of

religion has been required for centuries.

The problem of the twentieth century, then, and probably of other

centuries to come, is how the constructive forces in modern society, of

which the schools of nations should stand first, can best direct their

efforts to influence and direct the deeper sources of the life of a

people, so that the national characteristics it is desired to display to

the world will be developed because the schools have instilled into every

child these national ideals. Many forces must coöperate in such a task,

but unless the schools of nations become clearly conscious of national

needs and of international purposes, become inspired by an ideal of

service for the welfare of mankind, substitute among national groups

competition in the things of the spirit--art, architecture, music, sports,

education, letters, sanitation, housing, public works, and such

applications of science as minister to health and happiness--for

competition in the creation of material wealth, the piling-up of

armaments, the extension of national boundaries, and the present

overemphasis of a narrow nationalism, and direct the energies of coming

generations to the carrying-out of this new and larger human service,

nations must inevitably fail to reach the world position they might

otherwise have occupied, destructive international competition and warfare

will continue, and the advancement of world civilization and international

well-being will be greatly retarded thereby.

In this work of advancing world civilization, the nations which have long

been in the forefront of progress must expect to assume important roles.

It is their peculiar mission--for long clearly recognized by Great Britain

and France in their political relations with inferior and backward

peoples; by the United States in its excellent work in Cuba, Porto Rico,

and the Philippines; and clearly formulated in the system of "mandatories"

under the League of Nations--to help backward peoples to advance, and to

assist them in lifting themselves to a higher plane of world civilization.

In doing this a very practical type of education must naturally play the

leading part, and time, probably much time, will be required to achieve

any large results. Disregarding the large need for such service among the

leading world nations, the map reproduced on the opposite page reveals how

much of such work still remains to be done in the world as a whole. "The

White Man's Burden" truly is large, and the larger world tasks of the

twentieth century for the more advanced nations will be to help other

peoples, in distant and more backward lands, slowly to educate themselves

in the difficult art of self-government, gradually establish stable and

democratic governments of their own, and in time to take their places

among the enlightened and responsible peoples of the earth.

[Illustration: FIG. 240. THE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS OF THE FUTURE

Transition peoples are shaded; dependant and backward peoples black. The

"mandatories" of the "League of Nations" will be in the black areas, and

will have to be carried by the nations which have made the most progress

in civilization and shown in the highest sense of responsibility for the

welfare of peoples that have come under their care. The black areas reveal

"The White Man's Burden" of the future.]

At the bottom of all this work and service lie the new human-liberty

conceptions first worked out and formulated for the world by little

Greece, In time the ideas to which they gave expression have become the

heritage of what we know as our western civilization, and the warp and

woof of the intellectual and political life of the modern world. As a

result of the Industrial Revolution, and of the new political and

commercial and social forces of our time, this western civilization, using

education as its great constructive tool, is now spreading to every

continent on the globe. The task of succeeding centuries will be to carry

forward and extend what has been so well begun; to level up the peoples of

the earth, as far as inherent differences in capacity will permit; and to

extend, through educative influences, the principles and practices of a

Christian civilization to all. In establishing intelligent and interested

government, and in moulding and shaping the destinies of peoples, general

education has become the great constructive tool of modern civilization. A

hundred and fifty years ago education was of but little importance, being

primarily an instrument of the Church and used for church ends. To-day

general education is an instrument of government, and is rightfully

regarded as a prime essential to good government and national progress.

With the spread of the democratic type the importance of the school is

enhanced, its control by the State becomes essential, its continued

expansion to include new types of schools and new forms of educational

opportunities and service a necessity, the study of its organization and

administration and problems becomes a necessary function of government,

while the training it can give is dignified and made the birthright of

every boy and girl.

FOOTNOTES

PREFACE

[1] _Syllabus of Lectures on the History of Education, with

Bibliographies_, 1st ed., 302 pp., illustrated, New York, 1902; 2d ed.,

with classified bibliographies, 358 pp., illustrated. New York, 1905.

PART I

CHAPTER I

[1] The average size of an Illinois county is 550 square miles, or an area

22 x 25 miles square. The State of West Virginia contains 24,022 square

miles, and Rhode Island 1067 square miles. Rhode Island would be

approximately 30 x 36 miles square, which would make Attica approximately

20 x 36 miles square in area.

[2] The nearest analogy we have to the Greek City-States exists in the

local town governments of the New England States, particularly

Massachusetts, and the local county-unit governmental organizations of a

number of the Southern States, though in each of these cases we have a

state and a federal government above to unify and direct and control these

small local governments, which did not exist, except temporarily, in

Greece.

If an area the size of West Virginia were divided into some twenty

independent counties, which could arrange treaties, make alliances, and

declare war, and which sometimes united into leagues for defense or

offense, but which were never able to unite to form a single State, we

should have a condition analogous to that of mainland Greece. [3] A sea-

faring people, the Greeks became to the ancient Mediterranean world what

the English have been to the modern world. Southern Italy became so

thickly set with small Greek cities that it was known as _Magna Graecia_.

On the island of Sicily the city of Syracuse was founded (734 B.C.), and

became a center of power and a home of noted Greeks. The city of

Marseilles, in southern France, dates from an Ionic settlement about 600

B.C. The presence of another seafaring people, the Phoenicians, along the

northern coast of Africa and southern and eastern Spain, probably checked

the further spread of Greek colonies to the westward. The city of Cyrene,

in northern Africa, dates from about 630 B.C. Greek colonists also went

north and east, through the Dardanelles and on into the Black Sea. (See

map, Figure 2.) Salonica and Constantinople date back to Greek

colonization. Many of the colonies reflected great honor and credit on the

motherland, and served to spread Greek manners, language, and religion

over a wide area.

[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 nobility 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 Halicarnassus, 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 constitution 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 analogous modern

situation, though on a much larger scale.

[9] Two Greek poems illustrate 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 passest 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 hell by teaching reading and writing.

[11] Women were not supposed to possess any of the privileges of

citizenship, belonging rather to the alien class. 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 attitude 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 Halicarnassus, _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 pronouncing

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 Hellas, for

books were written only in capitals at this time. There were no spaces

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 Hellas_, 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 noble 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 noblest 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 Hellas. 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 nonentity, 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 disassociate himself

from his family and associate 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 Hellas_, 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 institutions of the Greek City-State were in themselves

highly educative. The chief of these were:

1. The Assembly, 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 Hellas 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;

Heraclites (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 embassies 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 classes 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 passed 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 Bibliothèque 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 circumference, and predicted that one

might sail from Spain to the Indies along the same parallel of latitude.

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

[14] Henry Sumner Maine.

CHAPTER III

[1] This struggle of the common people (_plebeians_) for an equal place

with the ruling class (_patricians_) before the law, in religious matters,

and in politics, covered two and a half centuries, the old restrictions

being broken down but gradually. The most important steps in the process

were:

509 B.C. Magistrates forbidden to scourge or execute a Roman citizen

without giving him a chance to appeal to the people in their

popular assembly. This "right of appeal" was regarded as the Magna

Charta of Roman liberty.

494 B.C. Plebeian soldiers granted officers of their own

(_Tribunes_) to protect them against patrician cruelty and

injustice.

451-449 B.C. Laws must be written--Code commission appointed. Result,

the _Laws of the Twelve Tables_ (R. 12); these mark the

beginning of the great Roman legal system.

445 B.C. Intermarriage between the two orders legalized.

367 B.C. Right to hold office granted, and one of the Consuls elected

each year to be a plebeian.

250 B.C. By this date the distinctions between the two orders had

disappeared; patricians and plebeians intermarried and formed one

compact body of citizens in the Roman State.

[2] "The scholar who compares carefully the Greek constitutions with the

Roman will undoubtedly consider the former to be finer and more finished

specimens of political work. The imperfect and incomplete character which

the Roman constitution presents, at almost any point of its history, the

number of institutions it exhibits which appear to be temporary expedients

merely, are necessary results of its method of growth to meet demands as

they rose from time to time; they are evidence, indeed, of its highly

practical character." (Adams, G. B., _Civilization during the Middle

Ages_, 2d ed., p. 20.)

[3] The same opportunity came to Athens after the Persian Wars and to

Sparta after the Peloponnesian War, but neither possessed the creative

power along political and governmental lines, or the tolerance for the

ideas and feelings of subject peoples, to accomplish anything permanent.

Rome succeeded where previous States had failed because of her larger

insight, tolerance, patience, and constructive to create a great world

empire.

[4] Caesar extended Roman citizenship to certain communities in Gaul and

in Sicily, and began the further extension of the process of assimilation

by taking the conquered provincial into citizenship in the Empire. This

was carried on and extended by succeeding Emperors until finally, in 212

A.D., Roman citizenship was extended to all free-born inhabitants in all

the provinces.

[5] For example, Balbus, a Spaniard, was Consul in Rome forty years before

the Christian era, and another Spaniard, Nerva, had become Emperor before

the close of the first century A.D. Many commanders in the army and

governors in the provinces were provincials by birth.

[6] Roman citizenship was much more than a mere name. A Roman citizen

could not be maltreated or punished without a legal trial before a Roman

court. If accused in a capital case he could always protect himself from

what he considered an unjust decision by an "appeal to Caesar"; that is,

to the Emperor at Rome. The protection of law was always extended to his

property and himself, wherever in the Roman Empire he might live or

travel.

[7] Both literature and inscriptions testify abundantly to the

affectionate regard in which Roman rule was held. The rule may have been

far from perfect, judged from a modern point of view, but it was so much

better and so much more orderly than anything that had gone before that it

was accepted in all quarters.

[8] Every house was protected from the evil spirits of the outside world

by Janus, and had its sacred fire presided over by Vesta. Every house had

its protecting Lares. The cupboard where the food was stored was blest by

and under the charge of the Penates. The daily worship of these household

deities took place at the family meal, the father offering a little food

and a little wine at the sacred hearth. Every house father, too, had his

guardian Genius, whose festival was celebrated on the master's birthday.

In a similar fashion the State had its temples, its sacred fire and votive

offerings, and various divinities ruled the elements and sent or withheld

success.

Almost every activity in life was presided over by some deity, whom it was

necessary to propitiate before engaging in it. Davidson says, with

reference to the practical nature of their religion, that "While the

Athenians rejoiced before their gods, the Romans kept a debtor and

creditor account with theirs, and were very anxious that the balance

should be on the right side."

[9] "Among our ancestors," says Pliny, "one learned not only through the

ears, but through the eyes. The young, in observing the elders, learned

what they would soon have to do themselves, and what they would one day

teach to their successor."

[10] Such careful physical training as was given in a Greek _palaestra_

and _gymnasium_ would have been regarded by the Romans as most effeminate.

Unlike the Greeks, who strove for a harmonious bodily development, the

Romans exercised for usefulness in war. Cicero exclaims, with reference to

Greek gymnasial training: "What an absurd system of training youth is

exhibited in their _gymnasia_! What a frivolous preparation for the labors

and hazards of war!"

[11] Macaulay, in his _Horatius_, describes the results of the education

of this early period as follows:

"Then none were for the party,

But all were for the State;

And the rich man loved the poor,

And the poor man loved the great.

Then lands were fairly portioned

And spoils were fairly sold;

For the Romans were like brothers

In the brave days of old."

[12] "The Romans," says the historian Wilhelm Ihne, "were distinguished

from all other nations, not only by the extreme earnestness and precision

with which they conceived their law and worked out the consequences of its

fundamental principles, but by the good sense which made them submit to

the law, once established, as an absolute necessity of political health

and strength. It was this severity in thinking and acting which, more than

any other cause, made Rome great and powerful."

[13] The lot of a captive in war, everywhere throughout the ancient world,

was to be taken and sold as a slave by his captors. Many educated Greeks

were thus taken in the capture of Greek cities in southern Italy and sold

as slaves in Rome. These were let out by their masters as teachers of the

new learning. Even the thrifty Cato, who vigorously opposed the new

learning on principle, was not averse to permitting his educated Greek

slaves to conduct schools and thus add to his private fortune.

[14] These men had little choice otherwise. Grain from Spain and Africa

became so cheap that a farmer could not raise enough on his small farm to

pay his taxes and support his family, so he was obliged to sell his land

to men who turned it into large cattle and sheep ranches. He would not

emigrate to the provinces, as Englishmen have done to Canada and

Australia, but instead went to the cities, where he led a hand-to-mouth

existence in a type of tenement house. It was from such sources that the

Roman mob, demanding free grain and entertainment in return for its votes,

was made up.

[15] Arithmetic was not easy for the Romans, partly because they had no

figure or other sign for zero, partly because they used a decimal system

for counting and a duodecimal for their money, and partly because the

Roman system of notation (I, V, X, L, C, D, M) did not adapt itself to

quick calculation. Try, for example, these simple sums:

Add: CCLVII Subtract: LXVIII

CIX XXXIV

------ ------

Multiply: CXXV Divide: XII |CXXXII

XII ------

----

[16] Finger reckoning (whence _digits_) with the Romans attained a

prominence probably never reached with any other people. Bills and

accounts were reckoned up on the fingers, in the presence of the patron.

Eighteen positions of the fingers of the left hand stood for the nine

units and the nine tens, and eighteen positions of the fingers of the

right hand stood for the nine hundreds and the nine thousands. For larger

sums, such as ten thousand and more, various parts of the body were

touched. Any one who betrayed, according to Quintilian, "by an uncertain

or awkward movement of his fingers, a want of confidence in his

calculations," was thought to be but imperfectly trained in arithmetic.

[17] There was much complaint that parents were slow with their fees, and

at times forgot them entirely if the boy did not turn out well. Finally,

in the reign of Diocletian (284-305 A.D.), in an effort to relieve the

distress of schoolmasters, prices were legally fixed at approximately the

equivalent of $1.20 per month per pupil for teaching reading and $1.80 for

arithmetic, measured in money values of a decade ago. These were regarded

as "hard times prices."

[18] "Reading aloud, with careful attention to pronunciation, accent,

quantity, and expression, formed an important part of the training in

literature of a Latin youth. Correct reading of Latin was a much more

difficult art, as practiced, than is the reading of English, as all of us

well know who learned properly to intone our

"Arma virumque cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris

Italiam, fato profugus, Lavinaque venit."

The lack of use of small letters and spacing between the words (R. 21), as

well as poor punctuation, also added to the difficulty.

[19] A nonsensical minuteness was followed here, and many trivialities

were emphasized. Juvenal tells us, in his Seventh Satire, written about

130 A.D., that "a teacher was expected to read all histories and know all

authors as well as his finger ends. That, if questioned, he should be able

to tell the name of Anchises' nurse, and the name and native land of the

stepmother of Anchemotus--tell how many years Acestes lived--how many

flagons of wine the Sicilian king gave to the Phrygians." This reminds us

of some of the dissected study of English and Latin until recently given

in our colleges and high schools.

[20] Quintilian well states the aim of this higher education when he says

that "the man who can duly sustain his character as a citizen, who is

qualified for the management of public and private affairs, and who can

govern communities by his counsels, settle them by means of laws, and

improve them by judicial enactments, can certainly be nothing else but an

orator."

[21] In his _Lives of Eminent Grammarians and Rhetoricians_, chap. I.

Suetonius lived from 75 to 160 A.D., and was an advocate at Rome and

private secretary to the Emperor Hadrian.

[22] There was a general dread of Greek higher learning on the part of the

older Romans, and this found expression in many ways. Among these was an

edict of the Senate, in 161 B.C., directing the Praetor to see that "no

philosophers or rhetoricians be suffered at Rome" (R. 20), a decree which

could not be enforced, and the edict of the Censors, in 92 B.C. (R. 20),

expressing their disapproval of the Latin schools of rhetoric.

[23] These seven studies became the famous studies of the church schools

of the Middle Ages, with Grammar as the greatest and most important study

(see chap. VII; R. 74). The curriculum of the Middle Ages was a direct

inheritance from Rome.

[24] See Quintilian, _Institutes of Oratory_, book I, chap. X, 22, 37, and

46. This chapter is devoted largely to a description of the use of these

studies.

[25] Sample questions which were debated to bring out the fine

distinctions in Roman Law and Ethics were:

(a) Was a slave about whose neck a master had hung the leather or

golden token (worn by free youths only), in order to smuggle him

past the boundary, freed when he reached Roman soil wearing this

insignia of freedom?

(b) If a stranger buys a prospective draught of fishes and the

fisherman draws up a casket of jewels, does the stranger own the

jewels?

[26] In the later centuries of the Empire, people went to hear a man who

could orate or declaim, as people now do to hear a great political orator,

a revivalist preacher, or a popular actor or singer. A form of amusement

for distinguished travelers passing through a city was to have some one

orate before them. "This power of using words for mere pleasurable

effect," says Professor Dill, in his _Roman Society in the Last Century of

the Western Empire_, "on the most trivial or the most extravagantly absurd

themes, was for many ages, in both West and East, esteemed the highest

proof of talent and cultivation."

[27] Each Greek rhetorician in Rome was given one hundred _sestertia_

(about $4000) yearly from the Imperial Treasury, Quintilian probably being

one of the first to receive a state salary.

[28] "He [Claudius] was also attentive to provide a liberal education for

the sons of their chieftains;... and his attempts were attended with such

success that they, who lately disdained to make use of the Roman language,

were now ambitious of becoming eloquent. Hence the Roman habit began to be

held in honor, and the toga was frequently worn." Tacitus's Account of

Britain, _Agricola_, chap. 21.

[29] England offers us the nearest modern analogy. This was one of the

last of the great European nations to establish popular education, but for

centuries previous thereto the great private, tuition, grammar schools of

England--Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, and others--together with the

Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, prepared a succession of leaders for

the State--men who have steered England's destinies at home and abroad and

made her a great world power.

[30] This grew up, as all law grows, by enacted laws and decisions of the

courts, and in time came to be an enormous body of law. Lacking the

printed law books and indices of to-day, to obtain a knowledge of Roman

law became a formidable task. Finally the practical Roman mind codified

it, and reduced it to system and order. The Theodosian Code, of 438 A.D.,

and the Justinian Code, of 528 and 534 A.D., were the final results. These

codes were compact, capable of duplication with relative ease, and later

became the standard textbooks throughout the Middle Ages. The great

importance of these codifications may be appreciated when we know that

almost all the original laws and decisions from which they were compiled

have been lost.

[31] The Romanic countries--France, Spain, Italy--have drawn their law

most completely from the Justinian Code. Due to Spanish and French

occupation of parts of America, Roman legal ideas also entered here, the

Louisiana Code of 1824 being Roman in law and technical expressions and

spirit, though English in language. Spanish and Portuguese settlement of

the South American continent has carried Roman law there.

[32] The Roman alphabet is the alphabet of all North and South America,

Australia, Africa, and all of Europe except Russia, Greece, Germany,

Austria-Hungary, and a few minor Slavic and Teutonic peoples. Even in

Germany and Austria, Roman letters were rapidly superseding the more

difficult German letters in the printing of papers and books for the

better-educated classes before the Great War. In India, Siam, China, and

Japan, Roman letters are also being increasingly used.

CHAPTER IV

[1] The Farmer's Calendar, given in the accompanying _Book of Readings_

(R. 14), illustrates very well the gods and sacrifices for one phase of

Roman life. Petronius, in his Satires, says, "Our country is so full of

divinities that it is much easier to find a god than a man."

[2] "The chief objects of pagan religion were to foretell the future, to

explain the universe, to avert calamity, and to obtain the assistance of

the gods. They contained no instruments of moral teaching analogous to our

institution of preaching, or to the moral preparation for the reception of

the sacrament, or to confession, or to the reading of the Bible, or to

religious education, or to united prayer for spiritual benefits. To make

men virtuous was no more the function of the priest than of the

physician." (Lecky, W. E. H., _History of European Morals_, chap, iv.)

[3] Seneca (4-65 A.D.), the tutor of the Emperor Nero, and the Greek

freedman Epictetus (d. 100 A.D.) both expounded Stoicism at Rome during

the first Christian century, and the _Thoughts_ of the Emperor Marcus

Aurelius (161-180 A.D.) represents one of the finest expositions of the

application of this philosophy to the problems of human life.

[4] See Proverbs, xxxi, for a good statement of the ancient Hebrew ideal

of womanhood.

[5] This collective term is applied to the first five books of the Old

Testament, and includes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and

Deuteronomy. These five books form a wonderful collection of the

historical and legal material relating to the wanderings and experiences

and practices of the people.

[6] Chapter 1 of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew gives, in detail

(1-16), the genealogy of Jesus, concluding with the following verse:

"17. So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen

generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are

fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto

Christ are fourteen generations."

[7] To many of these churches he wrote a series of epistles. These

constitute a little more than one fourth of the New Testament. See

accompanying _Book of Readings_ (or Romans, I, 1-17) for the introductory

part of Paul's Epistle to the Romans.

[8] "Its missionaries were Jews, a turbulent race, not to be assimilated,

and as much despised and hated by pagan Rome as by the mediaeval

Christians. Wherever it attracted any notice, therefore, it seems to have

been regarded as some rebel faction of the Jews, gone mad upon some

obscure point of the national superstition--an outcast sect of an outcast

race." (Adams, G. B., _Civilization during the Middle Ages_, p. 39.)

[9] "Starting from an insignificant province, from a despised race,

proclaimed by a mere handful of ignorant workmen, demanding self-control

and renunciation before unheard of, certain to arouse in time powerful

enemies in the highly cultivated and critical society which it attacked,

the odds against it were tremendous." (Ibid., p. 41.)

[10] "It is not easy to imagine how, in the face of an Asia Minor, a

Greece, an Italy the Roman split up into a hundred small republics; of a

Gaul, a Spain, an Africa, an Egypt, in possession of their old national

institutions, the apostles could have succeeded, or even how their project

could have been started. The unity of the Empire was a condition precedent

of all religious proselytism on a grand scale if it was to place itself

above the nationalities." (Renan, E., _Hibbert Lectures, 1880; Influence

of Rome on the Christian Church_.)

[11] In Acts xxv, 1-12, it is recorded that the Apostle Paul, accused by

the Jews and virtually on trial for his life before the provincial

governor Festus, fell back on his Roman citizenship and successfully

"appealed to Caesar." (See footnote 3, page 57.)

[12] "The miracle of miracles, greater than dried-up seas and cloven

rocks, greater than the dead rising again to life, was when the Augustus

on his throne, Pontiff of the gods of Rome, himself a god to the subjects

of Rome, bent himself to become the worshiper of a crucified provincial

of his Empire." (Freeman, E. A., _Periods of European History_, p. 67.)

[13] In 319 and 326 the clergy were exempted from all public burdens, and

only the poor were to be admitted to the clergy. In 343 the clergy were

exempted "from public burdens and from every disquietude of civil office."

In 377 all clergy were exempted from personal taxes. (See R. 38.)

[14] From the Roman world the idea has spread, through the Greek Catholic

Church, to Greece, parts of the Balkans, and Russia; through the Roman

Catholic Church to all western Europe and the two Americas; and through

the Protestant churches which sprang from the Roman Catholic by secession,

and the Mohammedan faith, to include almost all the world. Only among

uncivilized tribes and in Asia do we find any great number of

fundamentally different religious conceptions.

[15] Paul to the Romans (x, 9) stated the fundamentals of belief as

follows: "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt

believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt

be saved."

[16] M. Boissier. _La Fin du Paganisme_, vol. 1, p. 200.

[17] _Justin Martyr_ (105?-167), a former Greek teacher and philosopher,

continued to follow his profession, wear his Greek philosopher's garb, and

held that the teachings of Christianity were already contained in Greek

philosophy, and that Plato and Socrates were Christians before the coming

of the Christian faith.

_Clement_ (c. 160-c. 215), the successor of Pantaeus as head of the

catechetical school at Alexandria, held to the harmony of the Gospels with

philosophy, and that "Plato was Moses Atticized."

_Origen_ (c. 185-c. 254), a pupil and successor of Clement, and the most

learned of all the early Christian Fathers, labored to harmonize the

Christian faith with Greek learning and philosophy, and did much to

formulate the dogmas of the early Church.

_Saint Basil_ (331-379) tried to allay the rising prejudice against pagan

learning, and to show the helpfulness to the Christian life of the Greek

literature and philosophy.

_Gregory of Nazianzus_ (c. 330-c. 390) was filled with indignation and

protested loudly at the closing of the pagan schools to Christians by the

edict of the Emperor Julian, in 362.

[18] _Tertullian_ (c. 150-230) had been well educated in Greek literature

and philosophy, and had attained distinction as a lawyer.

_Saint Jerome_ (c. 340-420) was saturated with pagan learning, but later

advised against it.

_Saint Augustine_ (354-430), the master mind among the Latin Fathers, was

for years a teacher of oratory and rhetoric in Roman schools, and had

written part of an encyclopaedia on the liberal arts before his

conversion. Many others who became prominent in the Western Church had in

their earlier life been teachers in the Roman higher schools.

[19] Dreaming that he had died and gone to Heaven, he was asked, "Who art

thou?" On replying, "A Christian," he heard the awful judgment, "It is

false: thou art no Christian; thou art a Ciceronian; where the treasure

is, there the heart is also."

[20] The knowledge of Greek remained alive longer in Ireland than anywhere

else in the western world, being known there as late as the seventh

century. Greek was also preserved in parts of Spain for two centuries

after it had died out in Italy.

[21] In the West there was no other great city than Rome. At the period of

its maximum greatness, in the first century B.C., it was a city of

approximately 450,000 people.

[22] After many struggles and conflicts between the Bishops of

Constantinople, Alexandria, and Rome, the Bishop of Rome was finally

recognized by the second great Church Council, held at Constantinople in

381, as the head of the entire Church (Canon 3), corresponding to the

Emperor on the political side of the dying Empire. The separation of the

eastern and western churches was rapid after this time. (See Map, p. 103.)

[23] The word _pagan_ as applied to unbeliever illustrates this progress

of the Church, being derived from the Latin _paganus_, meaning countryman,

villager, rustic.

[24] See the accompanying _Book of Readings_ for a drawing and detailed

explanation of the monastery of Saint Gall, in Switzerland (R. 69). This

was one of the most important monasteries of the Middle Ages.

PART II

CHAPTER V

[1] The period from the reign of Augustus Caesar through that of Marcus

Aurelius (31 B.C.-192 A.D.) was known as "the good Roman peace." No other

large section of the western world has ever known such unbroken peace and

prosperity for so long a time. Piracy ceased upon the seas, and trade and

commerce flourished. The cities and the great middle class in the

population were prosperous. Travel was safe and common, and men traveled

both for business and pleasure. The Christian State within a State had not

yet taken form. Literature and learning flourished. The law became milder.

The rights of the accused became better recognized. A certain broad

humanity pervaded the administration of both law and government. There was

much private charity. Hospitals were established. Women were given greater

freedom, larger intellectual advantages, and a better position in the home

than they were to know again until the nineteenth century. It was the

Golden Age of the Empire. Toward the close of the period the Christian

Father, Tertullian, wrote: "Every day the world becomes more beautiful,

more wealthy, more splendid. No corner remains inaccessible.... Recent

deserts bloom.... Forests give way to tilled acres.... Everywhere are

houses, people, cities. Everywhere there is life."

[2] Slavery in Rome came to be much more demoralizing than ever was the

case in the United States. Instead of an ignorant people of an inferior

race, the Roman slave was often the superior of his master--the

unfortunate captive in an unsuccessful war against an oppressor. The

holding of such educated and intelligent people in slavery was far more

degrading to a ruling people than would have been the case had their

slaves been ignorant and of inferior racial stock.

[3] The Roman State had come to be essentially a collection of cities.

Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Corinth, Carthage, Ephesus, and Lyons were

great cities, judged even by present-day standards, throbbing with varied

industries and a strong intellectual life. In addition there were hundreds

of other cities scattered all over the Empire, each with its own municipal

life, while on the frontier were stockaded villages serving as centers of

trade with the barbarian tribes beyond.

[4] Chief among the new ideals that sapped the old Roman strength must be

mentioned the new Christian religion, with its doctrine of other-

worldliness and its system of government not responsible to the Empire.

Another influence was the rise of a super-civic philosophy, derived

chiefly from the writings of Plato (see footnote 1, page 42), which held

that certain men could be above the State and yet by their wisdom in part

direct it. The two influences combined to undermine the resisting strength

of the State.

[5] Not only was the future of western European civilization settled

there, but that of North and South America as well. Had Saracenic

civilization come to dominate Europe, the Koran might have been taught to-

day in the theological schools of Boston, New York, Chicago, San

Francisco, Buenos Aires, and Valparaiso, and the Christian religion been

the possession only of the Greek and Russian churches, while our

literature and philosophy and civilization would have been tinctured,

through and through, with oriental ideas and Mohammedan conceptions.

[6] It is hard for us to imagine what happened, for the Indians we know

to-day represent a much higher grade of civilization than did the German

invaders. If we could imagine the United States overrun by the Indians of

a hundred and fifty years ago, as the German tribes overran the Roman

Empire, and becoming the rulers of a people superior to them in numbers

and intellect, we should have something analogous to the Roman situation.

[7] As allies, citizens, soldiers, colonists, and slaves the Germans had

long been filtering into the Roman world, and the Roman world was in part

Germanized before the barriers were broken. These German-Romans helped to

assimilate the Germans who came later, much as Italian-Americans in the

United States help to receive and assimilate new Italians when they come.