Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/693

671 EDUCATION 671 were a source of enlightenment to surrounding nations. Not only the great lawgiver of the Jews, but those who were most active in stimulating the nascent energies of Hellas were careful to train themselves in the wisdom of the Egyptians. Greece, in giving an undying name to the literature of Alexandria, was only repaying the debt which she had incurred centuries before. Education became secular in countries where the priesthood did not exist as a separate body. At Rome, until Greece took her conqueror Daptive, a child was trained for the duties of life in the forum and the senate house. The Greeks were the first to develop a science of education distinct from ecclesiastical training. They divided their subjects of study into music and gymnas tics, the one comprising all mental, the other all physical training. Music was at first little more than the study of the art of expression. But the range of intellectual educa tion which had been developed by distinguished musical teachers was further widened by the Sophists, until it received a new stimulus and direction from the work of Socrates. Who can forget the picture left us by Plato of the Athenian palaestra, in which Socrates was sure to find his most ready listeners and his most ardent disciples ] In the intervals of running, wrestling, or the bath, the young Phaedrus or Thesetetus discoursed with the philosophers who had come to watch them on the good, the beautiful, and the true. The lowest efforts of their teachers were to fit them to maintain any view they might adopt with acuteness, Jegance, readiness, and good taste. Their highest efforts were to stimulate a craving for the knowledge of the unknowable, to rouse a dissatisfaction with received opinions, and to excite a curiosity which grew stronger with the revelation of each successive mystery. Plato is the author of the first systematic treatise on education. He deals with the subject in his earlier dialogues, he enters into it with great fulness of detail in the Republic, and it occu pies an important position in the Laws. The views thus expressed differ considerably in particulars, and it is there fore difficult to give concisely the precepts drawn up by him for our obedience. But the same spirit underlies his whole teaching. He never forgets that the beautiful is undistin- guishable from the true, and that the mind is best fitted to solve difficult problems which has been trained by the enthusiastic contemplation of art. Plato proposes to intrust education to the state. He lays great stress on the influence of race and blood. Strong and worthy children are likely to spring from strong and worthy parents. Music and gymnastics are to develop the emotions of young men during their earliest years, the one to strengthen their character for the contest of life, the other to excite in them varying feelings of resentment or tenderness. Reverence, the ornament of youth, is to be called forth by well-chosen fictions; a long and rigid training in science is to precede discussion on more important subjects. At length the goal is reached, and the ripest wisdom is ready to be applied to the most important practice. The great work of Quintilian, although mainly a treatise on oratory, also contains incidentally a complete sketch of a theoretical education. His object is to show us how to form the man of practice. But what a high conception of practice is his. He wrote for a race of rulers. He incul cates much which has been attributed to the wisdom of a later age. He urges the importance of studying individual dispositions, and of tenderness in discipline and punishment. The Romans understood no systematic training except in oratory. In their eyes every citizen was a born commander, and they knew of no science of government and political economy. Cicero speaks slightingly even of jurisprudence. Any one, he says, can make himself a jurisconsult in a week, but an orator is the production of a lifetime. No statement can be less true than that a perfect orator is a perfect man. But wisdom and philanthropy broke even through that barrier, and the training which Quintilian ex pounds to us as intended only for the public speaker would, in the language of Milton, fit a man to perform justly, wisely 7, and magnanimously all the offices, both public and private, of peace and war. Such are the ideas which the old world has left us. On one side man beautiful, active, clever, receptive, emotional, quick to feel, to show his feeling, to argue, to refine ; greedy of the pleasures of the world, perhaps a little neglectful of its duties, fearing restraint as an unjust stinting of the bounty of nature, inquiring eagerly into every secret, strongly attached to the things of this life, but elevated by an unabated striving after the highest ideal; setting no value but upon faultless abstractions, and seeing reality only in heaven, on earth mere shadows, phantoms, and copies of the unseen. On the other side man practical, energetic, eloquent, tinged but not imbued with philo sophy, trained to spare neither himself nor others, reading and thinking only with an apology ; best engaged in defend ing a political principle, in maintaining with gravity and solemnity the conservation of ancient freedom, in leading armies through unexplored deserts, establishing roads, fortresses, settlements, the results of conquest, or in order ing and superintending the slow, certain, and utter annihila tion of some enemy of Rome. Has the modern world ever surpassed their type 1 Can we in the present day produce anything by education except by combining, blend ing, and modifying the self-culture of the Greek or the self-sacrifice of the Roman 1 The literary education of the earliest generation of Christi- Christians was obtained in the pagan schools, in those great imperial academies which existed even down to the 5th century, which flourished in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and attained perhaps their highest development and efficiency in Gaul. The first attempt to provide a special education for Christians was made at Alexandria, and is illustrated by the names of Clement and Origen. The later Latin fathers took a bolder stand, and rejected the suspicious aid of heathenism. Tertullian, Cyprian, and Jerome wished the antagonism between Christianity and Paganism to be recognized from the earliest years, and even Augustine con demned with harshness the culture to which he owed so much of his influence. The education of the Middle Ages was either that of the cloister or the castle. They stood in sharp contrast to each other. The object of the one was to form the young monk, of the other the young knight. We should indeed be ungrateful if we forgot the services of those illustrious monasteries, Monte Cassino, Fulda, or Tours, which kept alive the torch of learning throughout the dark ages, but it would be equally mistaken to attach an exaggerated importance to the teaching which they pro vided. Long hours were spent in the duties of the church, and in learning to take a part in elaborate and useless ceremonies. A most important part of the monastery was the writing room, where missals, psalters, and breviaries were copied and illuminated, and too often a masterpiece of classic literature was effaced to make room for a treatise of one of the fathers or the sermon of an abbot. The discipline was hard ; the rod ruled all with indiscriminating and impartial severity. How many generations have had to suffer for the floggings of those times ! Hatred of learn ing, antagonism between the teacher and the taught, the belief that no training can be effectual which is not repul sive and distasteful, that no subject is proper for instruction which is acquired with ease and pleasure, all these idols of false education have their root and origin in monkish cruelty. The joy of human life would have been in danger of being stamped out if it had not been for the warmth and colour of a young knight s boyhood. He was equally well Middle