In previous chapters we have studied the nations of Western Asia
and Africa in regard to internal appliances for education, but more
especially in regard to external educational influence upon other
peoples.
At this important point in our discussions, when we are passing into a
new region—that of Europe, or “the West,” as contrasted with Asia as
“the East”—we may sum up briefly the chief results before considering
the special theme of this chapter.
Education in Egypt consisted, on the part of the common people, in
learning to read and write the script alphabet derived from the
hieroglyphics, the elements of arithmetic, and one’s trade or vocation.
A higher system of education was reserved for the candidates for the
priestly caste, including the branches of language, mathematics,
astronomy, natural science, music and religion. There was also a secret
doctrine taught to the illuminated ones who entered on the duties of
the priestly caste.
In Egypt the State was as thoroughly subordinated to the priestly class
as in Persia to the military caste, or in Phœnicia and Carthage to the
mercantile caste. The aim of life was there to prepare for death, and
the earthly hull of the body was to be carefully preserved as the soul
would need its body again after 3,000 years; it was carefully embalmed
and laid to rest in the tombs of the hills, or if royal was placed in a
pyramid. The court in which the dead were tried and judgment pronounced
upon their lives, decreeing the honors of burial or denying this
privilege was the great national educational institution.
With the old Persians education according to Herodotus consisted
chiefly in training its youth to bear arms and to tell the truth. To
use the bow and arrow skilfully and to ride on horseback fitted him for
duties in his warlike nation.
Theoretical education included the arts of reading, writing, and polite
behavior, and was in the hands of the eighty thousand Magi, a carefully
educated class, who divided their members into three grades: (_a_) the
apprentices, or first initiated; (_b_) journeymen, those who had passed
the second degree, and (_c_) masters, those who had reached the highest
degree. The Persian mind set up the principles of light and darkness,
which he further defined as good and evil. It was a point upon which
great stress was laid by their teachers, to inculcate a practice of
good and an abhorrence of evil. The public education lasted from the
age of seven to that of twenty-four. Before the fifth year the child
was not to be told “this is bad,” or “this is good,” but only told
“do not do it again,” when he committed a fault. Before the age of
seven years he was never to be whipped. The virtues of self-denial in
matters of eating and drinking, of conquest over one’s appetites, and
of obedience to what is prescribed, were especially inculcated.
Of the Phœnician education we know only that it laid great stress upon
what is useful in the arts and trades. The Carthaginian colony taught
their youth reading, writing, arithmetic, and religious duties, besides
a special trade and the use of arms. Their moral instruction was of a
questionable character, useful in their commerce perhaps, but admitting
of deceit and violence. “Punic faith” became a by-word in surrounding
nations for treachery. In Phœnicia we find a marked departure from the
family training that formed so large a part of the instruction in other
Oriental nations. Indifference toward family and one’s native land,
and a passionate love for adventure and commercial gain were fostered
necessarily in its system of education, because the State depended upon
these qualities for its prosperity.
In Judea the education wore an oriental stamp. Religious history
perhaps was the foremost of the branches of study. The arts of reading
and writing were required in order that the youth might learn to read
the written law which had been especially delivered to his nation from
the most high to Moses on Mount Sinai. The law was impressed upon the
memory of the child. Song and music were taught but gymnastics was
neglected. The girls learned household employments—spinning, weaving,
sewing, painting, cooking, dancing, and cymbal-playing. They were
educated by their mothers in piety, cleanliness, and morality. A school
of prophets seems to have been established by Samuel when music and
religious poetry were cultivated. After the Babylonian exile rabbinical
lore was prominent in the higher education.
The Mediterranean Sea is the center of all progressive civilization
in modern history. Upon its shores the Orient and Occident have met
and mingled. Phœnicia, Judea, Greece, Rome, Carthage,—these have
played their parts in its history. The European states trace the
first impulses of their culture to Asia. But Europe borrowed nothing
without assimilating it to a new principle radically different from the
Oriental principle. It is the principle of individuality—of personal
development, of personal achievement, of personal freedom,—that we meet
upon the shores of Europe, and education assumes at once a new interest
to us when we come to Greece and Rome.
A wide chasm separates the European education from the Asiatic. The
East celebrates the infinite as something not only without bounds and
limits, but as something devoid of all distinction, and hence devoid of
conscious personality; God is in his essence not revealable to man, is
their doctrine. Europe, on the other hand, celebrates the distinctions
within the personality. In Western Asia, and particularly in Egypt,
there was an approach toward the recognition of personality in God, and
in the Hebrew religion there was the complete attainment of this idea.
The Hebrew idea finds its beginnings in Asia, but its development looks
to Europe, whose peoples find in the religion derived from Judea their
ideal.
Greece and Rome develop the idea of individuality in a very different
manner from Persia and Egypt, and do not know anything of the Hebrew
idea until their national career has been run. Greece does not reach
the idea of one God as Jehovah, but it conceives the divine as
beautiful individuality—the gods of Olympus, serene and graceful, but
having the special character of human beings.
It was a great step to recognize this human character in the
divine,—and the Greek mind rejoiced in the consciousness that his gods
were so nearly of his own nature that they could and did dwell in human
bodies.
This idea furnishes us the first phase of Greek education—the education
of the body by gymnastic games, so as to make it perfectly beautiful
and graceful. Cultivation of the body was a religious exercise, for
it was a celebration of the divine by realizing it in the form of the
beautiful. The East Indian ascetic sought by all means to mortify and
deform the body. The Greek sought to perfect it.
There were games for all the Greek States—the Olympian, the Pythian,
the Nemæan, and Isthmian—international expositions of strength and
beauty.
When the ideal of beauty had been fixed, there came the sculptor who
conceived the forms and expressions of the gods of Olympus, taking
his hints from human models that he saw all around him. The national
culture in gymnastics first, the plastic arts second, these conspired
to produce the ideals of beauty which educated the Greek people, and
furnish an essential element in the education of all subsequent time.
Preceding all plastic art was the poetry of Homer, out of which the
Greek civilization seems to have been breathed.
The second book of the _Iliad_ furnished the staple of school
education, giving the history and geography of ancient Greece with the
most wonderful of literary forms. The _Odyssey_ extended the education
in the same direction, and gave under a thin veil of allegory, the
Greek moral code.
The general character of Greek education may be said to be æsthetic—a
cultivation of the sense of the beautiful, and a training of the body
into symmetry and grace. Gymnastics, music, and grammatical art were
the staples of their pedagogy. By music they meant not only a sense
of rhythm and measure, but spiritual culture in general—including the
several branches over which the Nine Muses presided—whence its name
“music.” Poetry and music and mathematics were all included under
this designation. Grammatical training included reading, writing, and
language studies.
In the development of individuality, the mutual independence of the
Greek States and difference in their races or stocks were both causes
and results. The Æolian, Dorian, and Ionian stocks manifested different
tendencies, the Æolians preferring ear-culture, or music; the Dorians,
bodily culture; the Ionians, poetry. The Dorians at Sparta educated
boys and girls in the same way, although in separate institutions.
There was, indeed, in Sparta, a tendency toward the Persian form of
education, with important differences in regard to truth-speaking and
honesty. The child was educated solely for the needs of the State,
being trained to endure heat and cold and fatigue, and every year being
obliged to conform to a more severe discipline, until at thirty years
he had become a complete Spartan veteran soldier. Nevertheless the
Spartan preserved his Greek individuality even under his Oriental forms
of despotism.
The Spartans, though agreeing with the Athenians in certain general
characteristics, were in sharp contrast to the latter in the spirit of
their education. It was their aim to produce able warriors that led
them to train their youth carefully in bodily strength and agility,
capacity of endurance, personal bravery, and patriotism. Up to the
seventh year the boy was educated in the family; after that time in
public, and fed at the common table, and trained with other youth in
the disciplines above mentioned, as well as in the art of skillful
theft. Every year there was a general public flogging in order to test
their strength of endurance and sense of honor. He who bore all the
pain without uttering a cry was crowned with garlands. Spartan youth
sometimes died under these tortures without uttering a sound. From year
to year the discipline became more and more severe. The Spartan girls
were trained to be companions of heroes, and had their own gymnasia
wherein they learned to run, to wrestle, to jump, and ride the chariot.
At Athens, the chief seat of the Ionian stock, we find the purest type
of Greek nationality.
The education of Spartans was designed, as has been said, to fit youth
for citizens that could defend the State. That of Athens was for free
individuality. The laws of Solon enjoined upon each father in Athens to
teach his son a trade, whereby he could earn his living. If the father
neglected this the son was absolved from the duty of supporting him
in old age. The law of Solon decreed that the boy, before all else,
should learn how to read and how to swim. It was a maritime State, and
the Greek lived much upon the water. The son of poor parents should be
taught music, horsemanship, and gymnastics, hunting and philosophy. It
was left to the father to decide whether these higher studies should
be undertaken or not. But public opinion was so strong that no father
dared to refuse a higher education to his son if his means allowed it.
For the first seven years the Athenian boy was under the care of the
women. During this period he played with rattles, balls, wooden horses,
dice and tops, the skipping of stones in the water, etc. The games and
plays of Greek children are interesting, when we study the development
of his individuality,—interesting also in hints as to the modern
experiment of the kindergarten.
At seven years began the school time of the Athenian boy. An old
superannuated slave was assigned to the work, and called in the Greek
language _pædagogos_, pedagogue, (_boy-driver_) who accompanied him
everywhere as supervisor. In the _pedagogium_ the boy learned to read
and write. Later came the music teacher, who taught him to play the
Cithæra and sing. At last he took up gymnastics and continued it till
his eighteenth year. Then he took up his trade selected by the father,
and at the age of twenty his education was considered complete.
In the famous funeral oration which Thucydides puts into the mouth
of Pericles he congratulates the Athenians on the fact that their
fatherland was a great educational center, a sort of school for all
Greece. Their temples and works of art were objects of study to all
enterprising strangers. Their artists, and poets, and philosophers were
sought for the education of all who aspired to culture. The Sophists
formed a guild of professional teachers. After Plato and Aristotle,
Athens remained a university for many hundred years, or until Justinian
closed her schools because of their hostility to the State religion.
The period of the Sophists is of great interest. As teachers of
dialectic and rhetoric, they endeavored to fit the Athenian youth for
skillful and effective pleas in the courts or persuasive harangues
before the people. They taught how to debate and how to make the
worse appear the better reason. They pushed their speculations
beyond rhetorical forms into the realms of philosophy, and in the
end questioned all principles of conviction, and even the bases of
morality. All faith was undermined. At this juncture rose Socrates,
the greatest character of his age, who showed up by a keener dialectic
the firm foundations of virtue and truth, under the shifting sands of
opinion and prejudice. Plato has preserved for us in his dialogues the
beautiful picture of Socrates in his knight-errant exploits against the
Sophists, and finally his tragic but heroic end. Plato’s works have
been for more than two thousand years a liberal education into sound
and deep philosophy, and, with the works of Aristotle, his pupil and
successor, form the canonical books of philosophy. They have furnished
the philosophical forms used by the Christian fathers in building up
the great structure of Christian theology.
The Greek people have given to the world the two great elements of art
and science—the æsthetic and theoretic forms of culture. Their defect
is found in their exclusive devotion to those two phases. We must find
in the Roman civilization the forms of the will which civilization has
needed in order to form political and social institutions—the Greeks
were weak on this side.
Above all, the deep spirituality, the communion with God as the one
Infinite Person, creator of heaven and earth, is not to be found
in Greek education, although it is the most important, nay, the
all-essential point in our modern education.
After the time of Aristotle the Greek intellect dissipated itself in
Stoicism and skepticism, and a cloud of darkness settled down gradually
over the country, when Rome conquered its last armies, and reduced it
to obedience to an alien principle. At a few centers like Alexandria
and Athens, art and science were cultivated to a very high degree,
but Greece had nothing new to contribute to the world, and its labors
henceforth were for Roman hire, or frequently the work of bondmen. The
wealthy Roman owned Greek slaves, who acted as tutors to his children
and producers of art for his amusement. But as nurses and tutors the
Greek soon spread his Greek education over the mighty nation that had
conquered the world.