UNIV

THE HISTORY OF WESTERN

EDUCATION

CHAPTER I

GREEK EDUCATION

I. INTRODUCTION

THE training and instruction of the young for the business of life is one of the most ancient concerns of mankind. Far back in remotest prehistory, when man was slowly emerging out of brutehood with the help of a feeble but growing social tradition, learning was doubtless in large measure a matter of experience and imitation. But even so early as the later palæolithic age, when the first true men lived in Europe, there must have been a more or less deliberate education. Achievements in art so perfect as those which appear in the best of the animal pictures engraved on horn and ivory or drawn on cave walls could only have been attained by definite teaching. Concerning the Why and the How of this teaching we can never hope to know anything, and can only speculate whether, like the wall-paintings, it may not have had its origin in some religious impulse. It is not till we come farther down the course of time into the neolithic age, and can reconstruct the past from the lore common to all the oldest literatures, and from our knowledge of contemporary aborigines like the Australians, who are still neolithic, that we begin to touch firm ground. The main educational fact in savage and semisavage life is the universal association of the initiation ceremonies by which young people are inducted into manhood or womanhood, with specific training in adult customs and obligations. Then at a time much later, and yet thousands

tion that was to come from the fusion of northern and southern

races.

The barbarian invasions came to an end with the immigration of the Dorians in the course of the Eleventh Century before Christ. Then followed three centuries which have not inaptly been called the Dark Ages of Greece. Little is known about them. But by the end of them great changes had taken place. The white-skinned, fair-haired men from the north had disappeared, absorbed in the brown-complexioned, dark-haired Mediterranean race which had peopled the Ægean lands when the Minoan Empire was flourishing. Social customs and institutions had undergone a transformation almost as thorough. At first sight it might seem as though the conquerors had been conquered by the land of which they had taken possession. But in actual fact something much finer had happened. A new people had been born, different in many respects from its parent and kindred peoples, and endowed with richer capacities than any of them. To this people their Aryan ancestry had given a language admirably fitted for the expression of science and philosophy, and a political genius that manifested itself, on the one hand, in an organization of the individual States into which the land was now divided, that combined aristocratic government with a great measure of freedom; and, on the other hand, in the pan-hellenic sentiment that rose above tribal differences, and brought the separate States together in common religious observances and in the great Games. From the southern strain came the potentialities of culture, in a religion of humanized divinities and in noble traditions of art which had grown to maturity in the old civilization of Crete. Even the aboriginal inhabitants represented by the serfs attached to the land contributed their share in the cult of Demeter, Persephone, Dionysus, and the other chthonic deities, from whose worship sprang tragedy, comedy, and the mysteries.

The spirit of the people is perhaps seen in most characteristic form in their religion. Apollo, Poseidon, Ares, Hermes, Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis and their other gods and goddesses, as the etymological evidence seems to suggest, are of Eastern origin, but in coming to Greece they underwent a

sea-change. It is not merely that like the Cretan mothergoddess they were more human than the deities of the East, but that they were at once representative of the great natural forces that affect man's life and of all the main human relationships. With such deities as these, it was possible for the Greeks to develop a free secular life. In the East, mankind is overshadowed by the immensity of natural phenomena. There, the gods are beings so immeasurably remote from man that their worshippers can only approach them in slavish awe, and the priests generally exercise a despotic influence on human affairs. In Greece, nature is more kindly, more readily controlled by man. The gods of nature, accordingly, were brought nearer the worshipper's level by being endowed with human attributes and associated with the walled city which had displaced the tribe as the unit of social organization; and the priesthood was reduced to insignificance as occasional agents in certain rites and ceremonies. For these reasons, Greek religion was not the religion of slaves but of free citizens. It brought down men's thoughts and affections from a dark heaven to a sunny earth, and led them to seek expression for their spiritual nature in the ordinary every-day relations with man and the world. In short, the great discovery of the Greeks was that the world in which man lives is not something foreign to his nature as man, but is in very truth an ordered world in which he can work out his own purposes. Beginning with the discovery that the mysterious powers on which all life depends are not alien to humanity, they went on to the discovery that it was possible to be at home in the world, and on that faith built up a wonderful structure of art, science, philosophy and free political life in the little city States.

This fine outcome of the Greek spirit, however, was not realized with equal completeness in all the States. Up to the Seventh Century there seems to have been a steady advance along the whole line. The tie of blood-kins hip, on which citizenship had been based by the Aryan conquerors generally, gave way to a wider and less exclusive franchise depending on the ownership of land, and in most of the States a republican constitution displaced the earlier kingship. With that went a common progress in culture and social freedom. But the

great growth in manufacture and sea-borne trade which began about the Sixth Century before Christ in those cities which were near the sea created a considerable and ever-increasing divergence among the Greek States. The States which were compelled by their situation to confine themselves to agriculture, chief of which was Lacedemon with Sparta as its capital, sank back into a narrow uncultured life and sought compensation in the arts of war. States like Attica and Corinth, on the other hand, which were favourably situated for commerce, became both rich and broad-minded in the exercise of their opportunities, and continued to develop still further the arts of peace. When we speak of Greece as the pioneer of European civilization, it is the Greece of the maritime cities, and above all of Athens, of which we think. For in them the genius of the Greek people came to its fullest perfection.

3. EARLY EDUCATION

Concerning education among the peoples with whom the Greeks were connected by physical and spiritual descent we know very little. It is possible that when we find out more about the wonderful civilization of Crete which has been revealed by excavation we may learn something about the educational institutions of the Minoan age. Meantime our only direct sources of information are the two Homeric epics, and these have to be used with great caution because of our uncertainty as to their origin and history. If the view that they represent one of the latest phases of the Minoan civilization transplanted to the mainland of Greece and modified in the process be accepted, and due allowance made for the possibility of changes and additions when they were being adapted for public recitation at the pan-Athenaic gatherings, we may look to them for some light on the state of education among the most cultured section of the Greek ancestry.

What strikes one most in perusing the Iliad and the Odyssey with this object is the scantiness of the references to education or to educational accomplishments like writing, a fact which suggests the absence of any system of formal education either in home or school. The only two specific references, as it

happens, are to the training of Achilles. The first of these occurs in the Ninth Book of the Iliad, where Phoenix in addressing Achilles reminds him that he had been his tutor when he was sent away from home in his boyhood, "unskilled as yet in remorseless war or in the councils where also men gain renown." "On this account," he says, "your father sent me with you to teach you to be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds." The passage implies the conjunction of a rhetorical and a military training in the education of the young men of the ruling classes, which is an interesting anticipation of an important phase of Athenian education some centuries later. Perhaps for this reason doubt has been cast on the idea that rhetoric played any part in the training of youths in the Homeric age on the mistaken assumption that society was then too primitive to require highly developed powers of oratory. But the age of the heroes was certainly not primitive, and it is equally certain that oratory did count for much, as is evident from the First Book of the Odyssey. In any case, the passage is so far true to the facts that it presents the education of Achilles as wholly practical, and suggests that a definite responsibility for the twofold training rested on the father. The arrangement in the case of Achilles is represented as an exceptional one, due to the fact that he had to be sent away from home. The presumption is that in ordinary circumstances the father would undertake the education of the son. The second reference is also to the education of Achilles. It is mentioned incidentally that he learned the art of healing from old Cheiron the Centaur, who was credited in Greek legend with a knowledge of medicine, music, and the other arts. Again, the case is exceptional, and this time no general conclusion can be drawn, unless it be that whenever for any reason an education beyond the powers of the home was required, it was given by some man of recognized wisdom to a disciple. The essential fact of the situation was not an institution like a school, but a personal relationship between teacher and learner. This view, as we shall find, was prominent in Greek educational practice at a later time.

Little as is known about education in the Homeric age, there is still less known about that of the older educational tradition.