The History Of Education, Ellwood P. Cubberley [motivational novels .TXT] 📗

[1] The average size of an Illinois county is 550 square miles, or an area 22 x 25 miles square. The State of West Virginia contains 24,022 square miles, and Rhode Island 1067 square miles. Rhode Island would be approximately 30 x 36 miles square, which would make Attica approximately 20 x 36 miles square in area.

[2] The nearest analogy we have to the Greek City-States exists in the local town governments of the New England States, particularly Massachusetts, and the local county-unit governmental organizations of a number of the Southern States, though in each of these cases we have a state and a federal government above to unify and direct and control these small local governments, which did not exist, except temporarily, in Greece.

If an area the size of West Virginia were divided into some twenty independent counties, which could arrange treaties, make alliances, and declare war, and which sometimes united into leagues for defense or offense, but which were never able to unite to form a single State, we should have a condition analogous to that of mainland Greece. [3] A seafaring people, the Greeks became to the ancient Mediterranean world what the English have been to the modern world. Southern Italy became so thickly set with small Greek cities that it was known as Magna Graecia.

On the island of Sicily the city of Syracuse was founded (734 B.C.), and became a center of power and a home of noted Greeks. The city of Marseilles, in southern France, dates from an Ionic settlement about 600

B.C. The presence of another seafaring people, the Phoenicians, along the northern coast of Africa and southern and eastern Spain, probably checked the further spread of Greek colonies to the westward. The city of Cyrene, in northern Africa, dates from about 630 B.C. Greek colonists also went north and east, through the Dardanelles and on into the Black Sea. (See map, Figure 2.) Salonica and Constantinople date back to Greek colonization. Many of the colonies reflected great honor and credit on the motherland, and served to spread Greek manners, language, and religion over a wide area.

[4] It is the great mixed races that have counted for most in history. The strength of England is in part due to its wonderful mixture of peoples—

Britons, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Northmen, to mention only the more important earlier peoples which have been welded together to form the English people.

[5] Athens, however, permitted the children of foreigners to attend its schools, particularly in the later period of Athenian education.

[6] “When I compare the customs of the Greeks with these (the Romans), I can find no reason to extol either those of the Spartans, or the Thebans, or even of the Athenians, who value themselves the most for their wisdom; all who, jealous of their nobility and communicating to none or to very few the privileges of their cities … were so far from receiving any advantage from this haughtiness that they became the greatest sufferers by it.” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in his Roman Antiquities book II, chap. XVII.)

[7] In Sparta the number of citizens was still less. At the time of the formulation of the Spartan constitution by Lycurgus (about 850 B.C.) there were but 9000 Spartan families in the midst of 250,000 subject people.

This disproportion increased rather than diminished in later centuries.

[8] The Austrian-Magyar combination, which held together and dominated the many tribes of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, is an analogous modern situation, though on a much larger scale.

[9] Two Greek poems illustrate the Spartan mother, who was said to admonish her sons to come back with their shields, or upon them. The first is:

“Eight sons Daementa at Sparta’s call Sent forth to fight: one tomb received them all.

No tears she shed, but shouted, ‘Victory!

Sparta, I bore them but to die for thee.’”

The second:

“A Spartan, his companion slain,

Alone from battle fled:

His mother, kindling with disdain

That she had borne him, struck him dead; For courage and not birth alone.

In Sparta testifies a son.”

“Go, tell at Sparta, thou that passest by, That here, obedient to her laws, we lie.”

(Epitaph on the three hundred who fell at Thermopylae.) [10] An Athenian saying, of a man who was missing, was: “Either he is dead or has become a schoolmaster.” To call a man a schoolmaster was to abuse him, according to Epicurus. Demosthenes, in his attack on Aeschines, ridicules him for the fact that his father was a schoolmaster in the lowest type of reading and writing school. “As a boy,” he says, “you were reared in abject poverty, waiting with your father on the school, grinding the ink, sponging the benches, sweeping the room, and doing the duty of a menial rather than of a freeman’s son.” Lucian represents kings as being forced to maintain themselves in hell by teaching reading and writing.

[11] Women were not supposed to possess any of the privileges of citizenship, belonging rather to the alien class. They lived secluded lives, were not supposed to take any part in public affairs, and, if their husbands brought company to the house, they were expected to retire from view. In their attitude toward women the Greeks were an oriental rather than a modern or western people.

[12] “We learn first the names of the elements of speech, which are called grammata; then their shape and functions; then the syllables and their affections; lastly, the parts of speech, and the particular mutations connected with each, as inflection, number, contraction, accents, position in the sentence; then we begin to read and write, at first in syllables and slowly, but when we have attained the necessary certainty, easily and quickly.” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, De Compos. Verb, cap 25.) [13] Fragments of a tile found in Attica have stamped upon them the syllables ar, bar, gar; er, ber, ger; etc. A bottle-shaped vase has also been found which, in addition to the alphabet, contains pronouncing exercises as follows:

bi-ba-bu-be zi-za-zu-ze pi-pa-pu-pe gi-ga-gu-ge mi-ma-mu-me etc.

[14] “Learning to read must have been a difficult business in Hellas, for books were written only in capitals at this time. There were no spaces between the words, and no stops were inserted. Thus the reader had to exercise his ingenuity before he could arrive at the meaning of a sentence.” (Freeman, K. J., Schools of Hellas, p. 87.) [15] The Greeks had no numbers, but only words for numbers, and used the letters of the Greek alphabet with accents over them to indicate the words they knew as numbers. Counting and bookkeeping would of course be very difficult with such a system.

[16] “These poems, especially Homer, Hesiod, and Theognis, served at the same time for drill in language and for recitation, whereby on the one hand the memory was developed and the imagination strengthened, and on the other the heroic forms of antiquity and healthy primitive utterances regarding morality, and full of homely common sense, were deeply engraved on the young mind. Homer was regarded not merely as a poet, but as an inspired moral teacher, and great portions of his poems were learned by heart. The Iliad and the Odyssey were in truth the Bible of the Greeks.”

(Laurie, S. S., Pre-Christian Education, p. 258.) [17] Davidson, Thos., Aristotle, pp. 73-75.

[18] Plutarch later expressed well the Greek conception of musical education in these words: “Whoever be he that shall give his mind to the