The History Of Education, Ellwood P. Cubberley [motivational novels .TXT] 📗
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And by that means he will become clear from all reproachful actions, for now having reaped the noblest fruit of music, he may be of great use, not only to himself, but to the commonwealth; while music teaches him to abstain from everything that is indecent, both in word and deed, and to observe decorum, temperance, and regularity.” (Monroe, Paul, History of Education, p. 92.)
[19] A flat circle of polished bronze, or other metal, eight or nine inches in diameter.
[20] “There were no home influences in Hellas. The men-folk lived out of doors. The young Athenian from his sixth year onward spent his whole day away from home, in the company of his contemporaries, at school or palaestra, or in the streets. When he came home there was no home life.
His mother was a nonentity, living in the woman’s apartments; he probably saw little of her. His real home was the palaestra, his companions his contemporaries and his paidagogos. He learned to disassociate himself from his family and associate himself with his fellow citizens. No doubt he lost much by this system, but the solidarity of the State gained.”
(Freeman, K. J., Schools of Hellas, p. 282.) [21] “No doubt the Athenian public was by no means so learned as we moderns are; they were ignorant of many sciences, of much history,—in short of a thousand results of civilization which have since accrued. But in civilization itself, in mental power, in quickness of comprehension, in correctness of taste, in accuracy of judgment, no modern nation, however well instructed, has been able to equal by labored acquirements the inborn genius of the Greeks.” (Mahaffy, J. P., Old Greek Education.) [22] The great institutions of the Greek City-State were in themselves highly educative. The chief of these were: 1. The Assembly, where the laws were proposed, debated, and made.
2. The Juries, on which citizens sat and where the laws were applied.
3. The Theater, where the great masterpieces of Greek literature were performed.
4. The Olympian and other Games, which were great religious ceremonies of a literary as well as an athletic and artistic character, and to which Greeks from all over Hellas came.
5. The city life itself, among an inquisitive, imaginative, and disputatious people.
[1] The culmination came in what is known as the Age of Pericles, who was the master mind at Athens from 459 to 431 B.C. During the fifth century B.C. such names as Themistocles and Pericles in government, Phidias and Myron in art, Herodotus and Thucydides in historical narrative, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in tragic drama, and Aristophanes in comedy, graced Athens.
[2] With the Greeks, morality and the future life never had any connection.
[3] The early Greek philosophers tried to explain the physical world about them by trying to discover what they called the “first principle,” from which all else had been derived. Thales (c. 624-548 B.C.), the father of Greek science, had concluded that water was the original source of all matter; Anaximenes (c. 588-524 B.C.), that air was the first principle; Heraclites (c. 525-475 B.C.), fire; and Pythagoras (c. 580-500 B.C.), number.
[4] “There was now demanded ability to discuss all sorts of social, political, economic, and scientific or metaphysical questions; to argue in public in the marketplace or in the law courts; to declaim in a formal manner on almost any topic; to amuse or even instruct the populace upon topics of interest or questions of the day; to take part in the many diplomatic embassies and political missions of the times—the ability, in fact, to shine in a democratic society much like our own and to control the votes and command the approval of an intelligent populace where the function of printing-press, telegraph, railroad, and all modern means of communication were performed through public speech and private discourse, and where the legal, ecclesiastical, and other professional classes of teachers did not exist.” (Monroe, Paul, History of Education, pp. 109-10.)
[5] The importance of a political career in the new Athens will be better understood if we remember that the influence on public opinion to-day exerted by the pulpit, bar, public platform, press, and scholar was then concentrated in the public speaker, and that the careers now open to promising youths in science, industry, commerce, politics, and government were then concentrated in the political career. It must also be remembered that the Greeks had always been a nation of speakers, both the content and the form of the address being important.
[6] Each of these philosophers proposed an ideal educational system designed to remedy the evils of the State. Xenophon (c.410-362 B.C.), in his Cyropaedia, purporting to describe the education of Cyrus of Persia, proposed a Spartan modification of the old Athenian system. Plato (429-348
B.C.), in his Republic, proposed an aristocratic socialism as a means of securing individual virtue and state justice. He first presents the super-civic man, an ideal destined for great usefulness among the Christians later on. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), in his Ethics, and in his Politics, outlined an ideal state and a system of education for it.
[7] “It is beyond all conception what that man espied, saw, beheld, remarked, observed.” (Goethe.)
“One of the richest and most comprehensive geniuses that has ever appeared—a man beside whom no age has an equal to place.” (Hegel.) “Aristotle, Nature’s private secretary, dipping his pen in intellect.”
(Eusebius.)
[8] “As Alexander passed conquering through Asia, he restored to the East, as garnered grain, that Greek civilization whose seeds had long ago been received from the East. Each conqueror in turn, the Macedonian and the Roman bowed before conquered Greece and learnt lessons at her feet.”
(Butcher, S. H., Some Aspects of the Greek Genius, p. 43.) [9] Webster, D. H., Ancient History, p. 302.
[10] Previous to this, paper had been made from the papyrus plant, but Egypt, having forbidden its export, necessity again became the mother of invention.
[11] With this exception, never before the Italian Renaissance was there such interest in collecting books. Almost every book written in antiquity was gathered here, and the library at Alexandria became the British Museum or the Biblioth�que Nationale of the ancient world. Every book entering Egypt was required to be brought to this library.
[12] He founded the science of geography. Before his time Greek students had concluded that the world was round, instead of flat, as stated in the Homeric poems. By careful measurements he determined its size, within a few thousand miles of its actual circumference, and predicted that one might sail from Spain to the Indies along the same parallel of latitude.
[13] From the tradition that seventy scholars labored on it.
[14] Henry Sumner Maine.
[1] This struggle of the common people (_plebeians_) for an equal place with the ruling class (_patricians_) before the law, in religious matters, and in politics, covered two and a half centuries, the old restrictions being broken down but gradually. The most important steps in the process were:
509 B.C. Magistrates forbidden to scourge or execute a Roman citizen without giving him a chance to appeal to the people in their popular assembly. This “right of appeal” was regarded as the Magna Charta of Roman liberty.
494 B.C. Plebeian soldiers granted officers of their own (_Tribunes_) to protect them against patrician cruelty and injustice.
451-449 B.C. Laws must be written—Code commission appointed. Result, the Laws of the Twelve Tables (R. 12); these mark the beginning of the great Roman legal system.
445 B.C. Intermarriage between the two orders legalized.
367 B.C. Right to hold office granted, and one of the Consuls elected each year to be a plebeian.
250 B.C. By this date the distinctions between the two orders had disappeared; patricians and plebeians intermarried and formed one compact body of citizens in the Roman State.
[2] “The scholar who compares carefully the Greek constitutions with the Roman will undoubtedly consider the former to be finer and more finished specimens of political work. The imperfect and incomplete character which the Roman constitution presents, at almost any point of its history, the number of institutions it exhibits which appear to be temporary expedients merely, are necessary results of its method of growth to meet demands as they rose from time to time; they are evidence, indeed, of its highly practical character.” (Adams, G. B., Civilization during the Middle Ages, 2d ed., p. 20.)
[3] The same opportunity came to Athens after the Persian Wars and to Sparta after the Peloponnesian War, but neither possessed the creative power along political and governmental lines, or the tolerance for the ideas and feelings of subject peoples, to accomplish anything permanent.
Rome succeeded where previous States had failed because of her larger insight, tolerance, patience, and constructive to create a great world empire.
[4] Caesar extended Roman citizenship to certain communities in Gaul and in Sicily, and began the further extension of the process of assimilation by taking the conquered provincial into citizenship in the Empire. This was carried on and extended by succeeding Emperors until finally, in 212
A.D., Roman citizenship was extended to all free-born inhabitants in all the provinces.
[5] For example, Balbus, a Spaniard, was Consul in Rome forty years before the Christian era, and another Spaniard, Nerva, had become Emperor before the close of the first century A.D. Many commanders in the army and governors in the provinces were provincials by birth.
[6] Roman citizenship was much more than a mere name. A Roman citizen could not be maltreated or punished without a legal trial before a Roman court. If accused in a capital case he could always protect himself from what he considered an unjust decision by an “appeal to Caesar”; that is, to the Emperor at Rome. The protection of law was always extended to his property and himself, wherever in the Roman Empire he might live or travel.
[7] Both literature and inscriptions testify abundantly to the affectionate regard in which Roman rule was held. The rule may have been far from perfect, judged from a modern point of view, but it was so much better and so much more orderly than anything that had gone before that it was accepted in all quarters.
[8] Every house was protected from the evil spirits of the outside world by Janus, and had its sacred fire presided over by Vesta. Every house had its protecting Lares. The cupboard where the food was stored was blest by and under the charge of the Penates. The daily worship of these household deities took place at the family meal, the father offering a little food and a little wine at the sacred hearth. Every house father, too, had his guardian Genius, whose festival was celebrated on the master’s birthday.
In a similar fashion the State had its temples, its sacred fire and votive offerings, and various divinities ruled the elements and sent or withheld success.
Almost every activity in life was presided over by some deity, whom it was necessary to propitiate before engaging in it. Davidson says, with reference to the practical nature of their religion, that “While the Athenians rejoiced before their gods, the Romans kept a debtor and creditor account with theirs, and were very anxious that the balance should be on the right side.”
[9] “Among our ancestors,” says Pliny,
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