Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/785

Rh glance at the educational system at Athens to see the comparative unimportance of eye education. In the training of Athenian youth, next to gymnastics, music received the most attention, and grammar—the remaining one of the three elementary subjects—included learning as well as reading the poets. Music included not only singing and playing upon the cithara and lyre, but also the cultivation of poetry. Music and poetry, again, were not cultivated as fine arts by the wealthy and leisurely classes merely, but were a part of the very life of the people. They were composed, too, upon the tongue, not upon paper, and they were apprehended and learned by the ear, not from a score or book. Even the laws were taught in song at Athens. Law and tradition, music and poetry, even arts and sciences, were transmitted orally from one generation to the next, apprehended by the ear and stored in the memory. In earlier times, when writing was not in general use, codes of laws, Homeric poems, and Vedic hymns were transmitted orally and accurately from generation to generation. Instruction in those days did not come through the cold medium of a book, but directly through the living words of parent and teacher This constant use of memory and reliance upon it gave it strength, and a man's learning, if limited, was at least in his head at command and not in his library. Compare modern fiction with that of other times. Then stories were told, not written; and listened to, not read. To say nothing of the training it gave the memory, was there not something more humanistic in the social company of story-tellers and eager listeners than in the modern writing and reading of novels? Now, the novelist alone in his study tediously composing and the reader alone in his room mentally devouring the printed page present phases of life that are unsocial, if not unheal thful and unnatural.

In the "good old times" men depended for their knowledge upon what they had either learned for themselves or heard and remembered. Now we depend, to a great extent, upon our libraries and books of reference. We quote the writings now, not the sayings, of great men, and do not come directly under their personal influence. In this respect there has been a great change even within a century, as books have multiplied and students are gathered less in the literary centers. As an example of our dependence on written authorities, may be mentioned the popular apotheosis of Webster's and Worcester's dictionaries. The old worship of the Bible seems to have been weakly transferred to the dictionary. In buying one of these books a person congratulates himself if, by paying a trifle more, he gets a supplement with a universal pronouncing biographical dictionary or gazetteer, forgetting that it is better to become acquainted with the works of one great man than to know when five hundred great