THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION.

By W. T. HARRIS.

VI.—GREECE AND ITS RELATION TO THE EAST.

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.