In sketching the history of education, I am careful not to limit my
consideration to the school. The most important interest to us is a
discussion of the new ideas contributed to civilization—the ideas that
have come down to our own time, and that have exercised an influence
on all the great national movements that have appeared on the surface
of history. The true view of history looks upon it as a process by
which Divine Providence educates the race. He unfolds something to each
people, and does not let that revelation vanish again from earth, but
causes its transmission to other nations, often by dark and mysterious
providences:
“One accent of the Holy Ghost
This heedless world hath never lost.”
In Persia we have a new religious principle making its appearance,
quite different from those we have met in our studies of China and
India. It is the distinction between good and evil, both being regarded
by the Persian as real and self-existent principles. Hence we have
a negative power in the divine; for not good alone is supreme, but
the good is limited by evil, and both are eternal, or at least real
and actual, in the present world. The Hindu did not acknowledge the
reality of evil; it was all “maya,” or illusion—a mere dream of our
feverish consciousness. The whole world of nature, as well as the
world of human beings, was likewise a dream that exists only in human
consciousness. It is the duty of the good Brahmin to get rid of this
dream of a world, by means of abstraction and penance and mortification
of the flesh. When the devotee has tortured and misused his body until
he has benumbed and paralyzed it to a degree that it can not feel or
perceive, then he is no longer haunted by the things of the world. They
do not any longer flow into his mind through his senses, and he becomes
divine, or like Brahm, who has no distinctions whatever, and hence no
knowledge of anything, nor consciousness of himself. For consciousness
is a distinction of the me into subject and object, the knowing and the
known—I and me.
The Hindu will not regard evil as divine, or as a part of the
highest principle. He goes farther than this,—he will not admit any
distinctions at all as divine. He thinks all distinction is division or
limitation. Limitation in God is the distinction of his infinitude. It
will not do, therefore, to think God as this or that, or as not this
or that, for thus we should limit him. He must be pure unity, without
distinction—yes, he must be above unity, above all thought.
The Hindu, therefore, can not permit the ideas of righteousness
and goodness to be applied to Brahm any more than he can admit the
application of wickedness and evil. Special gods, Indra, Varuna,
Vishnu, Brahma, may be righteous, but Brahm is above goodness and above
righteousness, as well as above evil.
The Persian, however, does not accept such a doctrine. He believes
that there is Ahura-Mazda (Ormuzd), the lord of all good, and opposed
to him is Ahriman, the lord of all evil. The Persian insists on this
dualism. Both principles are real; they are in perpetual conflict.
This difference in religious principles causes great differences in
character between the two peoples.
The Persian was an active people, making war on surrounding nations
and fighting to extend the dominion of Ahura-Mazda and to gain a
victory over Ahrimanes. The Hindu, on the other hand, in his education,
cultivates abstract contemplation and meditation, and does not believe
in wars or conflict. The child must be taught how to attain the
blessedness of passivity and repose. No active duties for him—no
struggles to overcome nature, to slay wild beasts or exterminate the
pests of the earth, but he must be mild, and spare animal life, even
in tigers, serpents, scorpions, and vermin. The Persian education
fits the youth for a career of active warfare against wild beasts and
all unclean animals. Clean animals are such as are in the service of
light and truth and purity and cleanliness. The unclean do not serve
Ahura-Mazda, but darkness and evil and filth and foulness. Unclean
beasts are supposed to be tenanted by evil spirits in the service of
Ahriman. Not only the horse and cow, but the hedgehog, who roams about
at night when evil spirits are abroad, and the beaver, who kills the
evil beings in the water, are clean animals. All scavenger animals—all
carrion birds also serve Ahura-Mazda.
This principle of good and evil seems to have been at first the
principle of light and darkness only. It would seem that Zoroaster
converted what was a principle of nature into a spiritual principle.
The religion of the Brahmins was also a religion based chiefly on the
same distinction of light and darkness, in the early times before their
migration from the high table-lands of Bactria, to the southeast, to
the Indus valley. But the Brahmin, given to abstract thinking, ascended
to the idea of a supreme unity as the origin and final destiny of his
Vedic gods of the sky, while the Persian changed light and darkness
to moral principles of good and evil, and made their difference more
substantial than their unity.
Persian education, in the family and school, trained the youth to ride
on horseback, to shoot with the bow and arrow, and, above all things,
to speak the truth. This duty to speak the truth is to the Persian
before all other duties, because truth is akin to clearness and light,
and hence also to the good and pure—to Ahura-Mazda. Falsehood is the
setting up of what is not, and hence inconsistent with reality. Hence
the veil of falsehood prevents one from seeing reality, and hence it
is akin to darkness. Next to truth-speaking is the practice of justice
among the Persians. Like the truth, justice is self-consistent, and
hence clear and simple. Justice treats each one according to his deed,
returning upon him like for like. What one actually does is treated as
the reality of his will, and justice is therefore a sort of respect
shown toward personal reality. The thief steals property; justice
says, “I respect your will; you wish to destroy the right of property,
and _your_ right of property shall be destroyed because it is _your_
will. The people who are not thieves all will to respect the right of
property, and therefore their property shall be respected. You, thief,
shall lose your property, and also the ownership of your limbs: you
shall go into prison, and sit still, and no longer possess the freedom
of locomotion.” Injustice would make all human action uncertain and
obscure, and the darkness of Ahriman would prevail.
Truth-speaking is the worship of reality. If all things and all events
are only a dream, it is of no consequence to pay so much respect to
them as to be scrupulous of veracity in regard to them. Hence the
Hindu makes monstrous fables about things and events, and lets them
become the sport of his imagination. Thus we see how deep-reaching the
religious principle is, and how widely different the Persian system of
education is from the Hindu.
The Chinese revere the past, and make their education consist in
memorizing with superstitious exactness the forms of the past—the
maxims of Confucius and Mencius. Even the vehicle of literature, the
art of writing, requires prodigious efforts of memory to acquire
it. “Do not exercise your spontaneity, but conform to the past. Be
contented in repeating the thoughts which were uttered twenty-five
hundred years ago. Make no new paths; plan out no new undertakings.”
The Persian is not content with the past. He must assist Ahura-Mazda
in the great contest with evil and darkness, and hence he must do
something new. He must hurry to the front. Along the border-land rages
the fight. The man who is content to remain within the domain already
conquered is a craven, and does nothing for the extension of the realm
of light and goodness, but allows the realm of darkness and evil to
hold its own attitude of defiance.
Besides truth-speaking and faithfulness to promises, the Persians
prized gymnastics. All boys were trained in throwing the spear and
javelin, as well as in shooting the bow and arrow and riding on
horse-back. An active life is provided for. This training of the body
is for real service in the world. The tortures and mortification of the
body in India show a very different object.
The Persian youth were educated at home in the family, chiefly by the
mothers, until the seventh year. Then the public education began, under
the care of teachers venerable with age and exemplary character. From
ten to fifteen years the boys learned prayers and the holy books of
Zoroaster, and especially the ceremonies necessary to purification.
The belief was that a person became unclean if he touched a corpse of
man or of any clean animal. All clean animals became unclean at death,
while all unclean animals became clean at death. For death was the
symbol of conquest by the opposing power. The Persian who had become
unclean must go through a tedious process of purification. It was a
process of driving out the evil spirit that had taken possession of
him. After various ceremonies of sprinkling himself with earth and
water and gomez, he drove the evil demon from his head and body and
limbs, and could now approach his fellow men once more and go near
sacred fire. The formal ceremony of purification must be undertaken,
not only on occasions of touching unclean things, but also at stated
periods, in order to counteract unobserved pollution that might have
happened. At the age of fifteen the boy put on the sacred girdle,
composed of exactly seventy-two threads of camel’s hair or wool, worn
day and night for protection from evil spirits. On putting on this
girdle, after the ceremony of purification, the youth took a solemn vow
to obey the law of Zoroaster.
The school education took place in the public market-place. There were
four divisions, one set apart for the boys who had not put on the
sacred girdle; another for the youth between fifteen and twenty-five
years; another for those between twenty-five and fifty years, and a
fourth for the old men, who came when they pleased. The second class,
the unmarried youth, passed the night under arms as a police force
or a garrison for defense. The boys brought with them their dinner,
consisting of bread and water-cresses.
Hunting was practiced by the youth as a proper military training. The
youth were compelled to live on such game as they could kill, otherwise
they must go hungry. The public education was open to all classes of
citizens, but only the boys and not the girls, it seems, received it.
There was special education for the nobility to supplement the public
education. It was such education as pages receive by attending court
and seeing the fine manners there, observing the looks and behavior of
great statesmen and heroes.
The Persian was taught to spread life, plant trees, dig wells,
fertilize deserts; especially it was his duty to extend the frontier
and carry far and wide the dominion of the great king of Persia,
vicegerent of Ormuzd.
The great monarchies of the river valley of the Tigris and Euphrates
were subdued and added to the Persian empire. The wonderful cities
of Babylon and Nineveh had been the wonders of the world in arts
and commerce, and at times the terror of surrounding nations. Cyrus
conquered Lydia, and then Babylon. Cambyses conquered Egypt. Darius
and Xerxes carried war into Europe, and finally Persia receives its
first check from the Greeks, who by-and-by, under Alexander, conquer
the whole of the Persian empire.
The Persians were a composite people, no less than twelve tribes or
nations being combined by the genius of Cyrus. There seems to have been
in the tribe of the Magi a series of degrees indicating progressive
culture in wisdom. There are mentioned the herbeds, or apprentices, the
moheds, or journeymen, and the destur-moheds, or masters.
The river valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, and the valley of the
Nile are wonderfully rich in historic material. We have learned much by
means of excavations in the ruins about the ancient civilizations that
prevailed there. There was another river valley farther to the north.
The Oxus River, that now flows into the sea of Aral, once flowed with
the Aral waters into the Caspian Sea. Great nations lived in that river
valley, and terrible struggles went on between the Tartaric hordes that
came in from the northeast, and Aryan and Semitic tribes on the south.
Persian influence extended with its conquests until it affected in one
way or another all the nations about the Mediterranean Sea. Many are
the doctrines and customs which have entered European culture, which
indicate that influence. Secret societies point back to a derivation
from the Persian Magi. Commonly it is some reaction that we discover.
The Christian faith was obliged to defend itself often in its early
career against some view of God and the world that had come west from
Persia. The heresies of Gnosticism and of Neo-Platonism were chiefly
of Persian origin. The endeavor to explain nature and man had led to
the adoption of such theories as were hostile to the revealed truth. In
the early period of the Roman emperors, the Persian worship of Mithra
extended very widely among the Roman people.
What was positive with the Persians is the principle of activity, of
active contest against the empire of darkness and evil. This principle
has survived, we hope, and will survive, as an essential constituent
of the faith of all future peoples. No compromise with evil, but its
subjugation by light and truth!