Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/837

Rh The extraordinary care that the Grecian boy received in his formative years made his moral training more effective than that inculcated by the most careful of modern parents. His general education, coupled with skillful and continuous physical instruction, produced a moral cultivation very similar and fully as strict as that the Christian father deems necessary for his daughters. A pedagogue, generally an old and trusted slave, led the boys to school and called for them after it closed, carried the books, looked out for the little boys, kept the older ones from fighting and falling into bad company, and had a general oversight of their conduct and street form. He was by no means a schoolmaster or even a private tutor, not even being allowed to enter the schoolroom. Oftentimes ignorant in the extreme, he was chosen simply because of his loyalty to the family, and sometimes, I fear, because he was unfit for any other occupation. Though the butt of the boys' ridicule, and bitterly assailed by the comic poets and low wits of the day, he did an incalculable service in preventing vicious companionships and keeping pure the minds of those intrusted to his charge.

The child was never sent off to boarding school, but boys attended the day school; town life prevailed; besides, that sentiment that zealously guarded the boy's purity with a pedagogue from his sixth to his sixteenth year could brook no intermission of personal oversight. Education was essentially private, the state having jurisdiction simply over the moral and not the professional standing of the teacher. Though the Greek as well as the Roman school opened very early in the morning, there appears to have been an afternoon session. By a law of Solon, the schools were not allowed to open before sunrise or to hold their sessions after sunset. A state fine refused admission to all except teacher and pupils; the false display of the unpractical public examination day was thus avoided. Outside of music and athletics there were no competitive examinations. The classical schoolman refused promotion for lifeless knowledge, and with keen insight into the real essentials of education demanded a living grasp of the subject. Every respectable town had its school. The large cities furnished their schools with all the necessities and many of the ornaments. The poorer towns often held their recitations in the open air, and when the hot weather came on took advantage of the colonnades and shade of public buildings. A similar custom at the celebrated Winchester school in England gave rise to the "cloister term."

There was always an altar to the Muses, the goddesses of learning, or busts of Mercury and various heroes, philosophers, and patriots as reminders to the boys. The master sat on a high seat; the boys sometimes on steplike benches, but usually on the ground