The History of Education Part 4

OUR DEBT TO h.e.l.lAS. As a political power the Greek States left the world nothing of importance. As a people they were too individualistic, and seemed to have a strange inability to unite for political purposes. To the new power slowly forming to the westward--Rome--was left the important task, which the Greek people were never able to accomplish, of uniting civilization into one political whole. The world conquest that Greece made was intellectual. As a result, her contribution to civilization was artistic, literary, philosophical, and scientific, but not political. The Athenian Greeks were a highly artistic and imaginative rather than a practical people. They spent their energy on other matters than government and conquest. As a result the world will be forever indebted to them for an art and a literature of incomparable beauty and richness which still charms mankind; a philosophy which deeply influenced the early Christian religion, and has ever since tinged the thinking of the western world; and for many important beginnings in scientific knowledge which were lost for ages to a world that had no interest in or use for science. So deeply has our whole western civilization been tinctured by Greek thought that one enthusiastic writer has exclaimed,--"Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin." [14] (R.

11)

In education proper the old Athenian education offers us many lessons of importance that we of to-day may well heed. In the emphasis they placed on moral worth, education of the body as well as the mind, and moderation in all things, they were much ahead of us. Their schools became a type for the cities of the entire Mediterranean world, being found from the Black Sea south to the Persian Gulf and westward to Spain. When Rome became a world empire the Greek school system was adopted, and in modified form became dominant in Rome and throughout the provinces, while the universities of the Greek cities for long furnished the highest form of education for ambitious Roman youths. In this way Greek influence was spread throughout the Mediterranean world. The higher learning of the Greeks, preserved first at Athens and Alexandria, and later at Constantinople, was finally handed back to the western world at the time of the Italian Revival of Learning, after Europe had in part recovered from the effects of the barbarian deluge which followed the downfall of Rome.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Try to picture what might have been the result for western civilization had the small and newly-developed democratic civilization of Greece been crushed by the Persians at the time they overran the Greek peninsula.

2. Do periods of great political, commercial, and intellectual expansion usually subject old systems of morality and education to severe strain?

Ill.u.s.trate.

3. Why was the change in the type of Athenian education during the Ephebic years a natural and even a necessary one for the new Athens?

4. Do you understand that the system of training before the Ephebic years was also seriously changed, or was the change largely a re-shaping and extension of the education of youths after sixteen?

5. Were the Sophists a good addition to the Athenian instructing force, or not? Why?

6. How may a State establish a corrective for such a flood of individualism as overwhelmed Greece, and still allow individual educational initiative and progress?

7. Do we as a nation face danger from the flood of individualism we have encouraged in the past? How is our problem like and unlike that of Athens after the Peloponnesian War?

8. What is the place in Greek life and thought of the ideal treatises on education written by Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle, after the flood of individualism had set in?

9. In what ways was the conquest of Alexander good for world civilization?

10. Of what importance is it, in the history of our western civilization, that Greek thought had so thoroughly permeated the eastern Mediterranean world before Roman armies conquered the region?

11. Picture for yourself the great intellectual advances of the Greeks by contrasting the tribal preparedness-type of education of the early Greek States and the learning possessed by the scholars of the University at Alexandria.

12. Compare the spread of Greek language and knowledge throughout the eastern Mediterranean world, following the conquests of Alexander, with the spread of the English language and ideas as to government throughout the modern world.

SELECTED READINGS

In the accompanying _Book of Readings_ the following selections are reproduced:

7. Wilkins: Athens in the Time of Pericles.

8. Isocrates: The Instruction of the Sophists.

9. Xenophon: An Example of Socratic Teaching.

10. Draper: The Schools of Alexandria.

11. Butcher: What we Owe to Greece.

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS

1. Characterize the many educational influences of Athens, as pictured by Wilkins (7).

2. Were the evils of the Sophist teachers, which Isocrates points out (8), natural ones? Compare with teachers of vocal training to-day.

3. What would be necessary for the proper training of one for eloquence?

Could any Sophist teacher have trained anyone?

4. Would it be possible to-day for any one city to become such a center of the world's intellectual life as did Alexandria (10)? Why?

5. Could the Socratic method (9) be applied to instruction in psychology, ethics, history, and science equally well? Why? To what cla.s.s of subjects is the Socratic quiz applicable?

6. How do you account for the fact that the wonderful promise of Alexandrian science was not fulfilled?

7. State our debt to the Greeks (11).

SUPPLEMENTAL REFERENCES

_The most important references are indicated by an *_

* Bevan, J. O. _University Life in Olden Time_.

* Butcher, S. H. _Some Aspects of the Greek Genius_.

* Davidson, Thos. _Aristotle, and Ancient Educational Ideals_.

* Freeman, K. J. _Schools of h.e.l.las_.

Gulick, C. B. _The Life of the Ancient Greeks_.

* Kingsley, Chas. _Alexandria and her Schools_.

Laurie, S. S. _Historical Survey of Pre-Christian Education_.

* Mahaffy, J. P. _Old Greek Education_.

Sandys, J. E. _History of Cla.s.sical Scholars.h.i.+p_, vol. I.

Walden, John W. H. _The Universities of Ancient Greece_.

Wilkins, A. S. _National Education in Greece in the Fourth Century_, B.C.

CHAPTER III

THE EDUCATION AND WORK OF ROME

I. THE ROMANS AND THEIR MISSION

DEVELOPMENT OF THE ROMAN STATE. About the time that the h.e.l.lenes, in the City-States of the Greek peninsula, had brought their civilization to its Golden Age, another branch of the great Aryan race, which had previously settled in the Italian peninsula, had begun the creation of a new civilization there which was destined to become extended and powerful. At the beginning of recorded history we find a number of tribes of this branch of the Aryan race settled in different parts of Italy, as is shown in Figure 16. Slowly, but gradually, the smallest of these divisions, the Latins, extended its rule over the other tribes, and finally over the Greek settlements to the south and the Gauls to the north, so that by 201 B.C. the entire Italian peninsula had become subject to the City-State government at Rome.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 16. THE EARLY PEOPLES OF ITALY, AND THE EXTENSION OF THE ROMAN POWER In 509 B.C. Attica opened her citizens.h.i.+p to all free inhabitants, and half a century later the Golden Age of Greece was in full swing. By 338 B.C. Greece's glory had departed. Philip of Macedon had become master, and its political freedom was over. By 264 B.C. the center of Greek life and thought had been transferred to Alexandria, and Rome's great expansion had begun.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 17. THE PRINc.i.p.aL ROMAN ROADS]

By a wise policy of tolerance, patience, conciliation, and a.s.similation the Latins gradually became the masters of all Italy. Unlike the Greek City-States, Rome seemed to possess a natural genius for the art of government. Upon the people she conquered she bestowed the great gift of Roman citizens.h.i.+p, and she attached them to her by granting local government to their towns and by interfering as little as possible with their local manners, speech, habits, and inst.i.tutions. By founding colonies among them and by building excellent military roads to them, she insured her rule, and by kindly and generous treatment she bound the different Italian peoples ever closer and closer to the central government at Rome. By a most wonderful understanding of the psychology of other peoples, new in the world before the work of Rome, and not seen again until the work of the English in the nineteenth century, Rome gradually a.s.similated the peoples of the Italian peninsula and in time amalgamated them into a single Roman race. In speech, customs, manners, and finally in blood she Romanized the different tribes and brought them under her leaders.h.i.+p. Later this same process was extended to Spain, Gaul, and even to far-off Britain.

A CONCRETE, PRACTICAL PEOPLE. The Roman people were a concrete, practical, constructive nation of farmers and herdsmen (R. 14), merchants and soldiers, governors and executives. The whole of the early struggle of the Latins to extend their rule and absorb the other tribes of the peninsula called for practical rulers--warriors who were at the same time constructive statesmen and executives who possessed power and insight, energy, and personality. The long struggle for political and social rights, [1] carried on by the common people (_plebeians_) with the ruling cla.s.s (_patricians_), tended early to shape their government along rough but practical lines, [2] and to elevate law and orderly procedure among the people. The later extension of the Empire to include many distant lands--how vast the Roman Empire finally became may be seen from the map on the following page--called still more for a combination of force, leaders.h.i.+p, tolerance, patience, executive power, and insight into the psychology of subject people to hold such a vast empire together. Only a great, creative people, working along very practical lines, could have used and used so well the opportunity which came to Rome [3]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 18. THE GREAT EXTENT OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE The map shows the Roman Empire as it was by the end of the first century A.D., and the tribes shown beyond the frontier are as they were at the beginning of the fourth century A.D. It was 2500 miles, air line, from the eastern end of the Black Sea to the western coasts of Spain, 1400 miles from Rome to Palestine, and 1100 miles from Rome to northern Britain. To maintain order in this vast area Rome depended on the loyalty of her subjects, the strength of her armies, her military roads, and a messenger service by horse, yet throughout this vast area she imposed her law and a unified government for centuries.]