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INTRODUCTION 1

INDEX 141

GREEK EDUCATION.

INTRODUCTION.

? 1. We hear it often repeated that human nature is the same at all times and in all places; and this is urged at times and places where it is so manifestly false that we feel disposed peremptorily to deny it when paraded to us as a general truth. The fact is that only in its lower activities does human nature show any remarkable uniformity; so far as men are mere animals, they have strong resemblances, and in savages even their minds seem to originate the same fancies in various ages and climes. But when we come to higher developments, to the spiritual element in individuals, to the social and political relations of civilized men, the pretended truism gives way more and more to the opposite truth, that mankind varies at all times and in all places. As no two individuals, when carefully examined, are exactly alike, so no two societies of men are even nearly alike; and at the present time there is probably no more fertile cause of political and legislative blundering than the assumption that the constitution successfully worked out by one people can be transferred by the force of a mere decree to its neighbors. All the recent experiments in state-reform have been based on this assumption, as if the transferrence of a House of Commons in any real sense were not as impossible as the transferrence of Eton and of Oxford to some foreign society.

Although, therefore, we cannot deny that past history contains many fruitful lessons for the bettering of our own time, it is not unlikely that the tendency of the present widely informed but hasty age is to exaggerate the likenesses of various epochs, and to overrate the force of analogy in social and political reasoning. Historical parallels are generally striking only up to a certain point; a deeper knowledge discloses elements of contrast, wide differences of motive, great variations in human feeling.

? 2. But as we go back to simpler states of life, or earlier stages of development, the argument from analogy becomes stronger, and the lessons we may derive from history, though less striking, are more trustworthy. This is peculiarly the case with the problem of education as handled by civilized nations in various ages. The material to be worked upon is that simpler and fresher human nature, in which varieties are due only to heredity, and not yet to the numerous artificial stimulants and restraints which every society of mature men invents for itself. The games and sports of children, all over the world, are as uniform as the weapons and designs of savages. The delights and disappointments of education have also remained the same, at least in many respects. The conflict of theoretical and practical educators, and the failure of splendid schemes for the reform of society by a systematic training of youth, mark every over-ripe civilization. Here, then, if anywhere, we may gain a distinct advantage by contemplating the problems, which we ourselves are solving, under discussion in a remote society. The more important and permanent elements will stand out clearer when freed from the interests and prejudices of our own day, and from the necessities of our own situation; and thus we may be taught to regain freedom of judgment and escape from the iron despotism of a traditional system. For if it be the case that in no department of our life are we more thoroughly enslaved than on the question of education, if it be true that we are obliged here to submit our children to the ignorance and prejudice of nurses, governesses, priests, pedants--all following more or less stupid traditions, and all coerced by shackles which they want either the knowledge or the power to break--then any inquiry which may lead us to consider freely and calmly what is right and what is not right, what is possible and what is not possible, in education cannot but have real value, apart from purely historical or learned considerations.

? 3. In fact, the main object of this book is to interest men who are not classical scholars, and who are not professional educators, in the theory of education as treated by that people which is known to have done more than any other in fitting its members for the higher ends and enjoyments of life. The Greeks were far behind us in the mechanical aids to human progress; they understood not the use of electricity, or of steam, or of gunpowder, or of printing. But, in spite of this, the Greek public was far better educated than we are--nay, to some extent, because of this it was better educated. For Greek life afforded proper leisure for thorough intellectual training, and this includes first of all such political training as is strange to almost the whole of Europe; secondly, moral training of so high a kind as to rival at times the light of revelation; thirdly, social training to something higher than music and feasting by way of recreation; and, fourthly, artistic training, which, while it did not condescend to bad imitations of great artists, taught the public to understand and to love true and noble ideals.

Why must these great ends of education be obscured or lost by the modern wonders of discovery, which should make them more easy of attainment and wider in circulation? Were the Greeks better off in education than we are, and, if so, why were they better off? or is all this alleged Greek superiority an idle dream of the pedants, with no solid basis in facts? If it is real, can we not discover the secret of their superiority, and use it with far wider and deeper effect in our Christian society? or is human nature of narrow and fixed capacity, and does the addition of wide ranges of positive science and of various tongues mar irrevocably the cultivation of the pure reason and of the aesthetic faculty? These are the problems which will occupy the following pages, not in their abstract form; they will be considered in close relation to the success or failure of the old Greeks in discussing and solving them.

? 4. There have been only two earlier nations and one later which could compete with the Greeks in their treatment of this perpetual problem in human progress. We have first the Egyptian nation, which by its thorough and widely diffused culture attained a duration of national prosperity and happiness perhaps never since equalled. Isolated from other civilized races by geographical position, by language, and in consequence by social institutions, the Egyptians prosecuted internal development more assiduously than is the wont of mere conquering races. The few foreign possessions acquired by the Egyptians were never assimilated, and the civilization of the Nile remained isolated and unique. We have reason to know that this refined social life, which is perpetuated in pictures on the monuments of the land--this large and various literature, of which so many fragments have been recovered in our century--was not created without a diffused and systematic education. In Plato's "Laws," the training of their young children in elementary science is described as far superior to anything in Greece. But, unfortunately, the materials for any estimate of Egyptian education, in its process, are wanting. We can see plainly its great national effects; we have even some details as to the special training in separate institutions of a learned and literary class; but nothing more has yet been recovered. If we knew the various steps by which Moses became "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," an interesting field of comparison would be opened to us; and here, no doubt, we should find some of our own difficulties discussed and perhaps solved by early sages, still more by an enlightened public opinion, showing itself in the establishment of sound traditions. And, no doubt, from the dense population, the subdivision of property and of labor, and the absence of a great territorial aristocracy, the education of the Egyptians must have corresponded to our middle-class and primary systems, together with special institutions for the higher training of the professions and of the literary caste.

? 5. If we could command our material, we might seek elsewhere for analogies to the education of our nobility and higher gentry. We know through Greek and Roman sources, as well as through the heroic poetry of the "Shahnameh," that the Aryan nobles who became, under Cyrus, the rulers of Western Asia, were in character, as they were in blood, allied to the Germanic chiefs and Norse Vikings, with their love of daring adventure, their chivalry, and their intense loyalty to their appointed sovereign. In these qualities they were strangely opposed to the democratic Greeks, on whom they looked with contempt, while they were appreciated in return only by a few such men as Herodotus and Xenophon. Indeed, such devotion to their sovereign as made them leap overboard to lighten his ship in a storm was confounded by the Greeks with slavish submission, Oriental prostrations, and other signs of humiliation. Nevertheless, the men whom the Greeks long dared not look in the face--the conquerors of half the known world, the successful rivals of the Romans for the dominion of the East--faced death under Xerxes and the last Darius with other feelings than those of slavish submission. Herodotus, in his interesting and sympathetic account of them, says their children's education consisted of three things--to ride, to shoot, and to tell the truth. If he had added a chivalrous loyalty to their kings like that of the French nobles in the last century, he would have completed the picture, and sketched a training which many an English gentleman considers little short of perfection.

? 6. The Romans are the only other ancient people who stand near enough to us to suggest an inquiry into their education. And it may be said that they combined the dignity of noble traditions with the practical instincts of a successful trading people. Hence Roman education, if carried on with system, ought of all others to correspond with that of Englishmen, who should combine the same qualities in carrying out an analogous policy, and in filling, to some extent, a similar position in the world. But so closely was all Roman culture based on Greek books and models that, although every people must develop individual features of its own--and the Romans had plenty of them, as we may see from Quintilian--any philosophical knowledge of Roman education must depend upon a previous knowledge of the Greeks. In many respects the Romans were a race more congenial to the English, and hence by us more easily understood. In the coarser and stronger elements of human character, in directness and love of truth, in a certain contempt of aesthetics and of speculation, in a blunt assertion of the supremacy of practical questions, in a want of sympathy, and often a stupid ignorance and neglect of the character and requirements of subject races, the Romans are the true forerunners of the English in history. Burdened as we are with these defects of national character, the products of the subtler and more genial, if less solid and truthful, Hellenic race are particularly well worth our consideration. This has been so thoroughly recognized by thoughtful men in our generation as to require no further support by argument. It only remains that each of our Hellenists should do his best, in some distinct line, to make the life of the Greeks known to us with fairness and accuracy.

FOOTNOTES:

P. 819.

INFANCY.

? 7. We find in Homer, especially in the "Iliad," indications of the plainest kind that Greek babies were like the babies of modern Europe, equally troublesome, equally delightful to their parents, equally uninteresting to the rest of society. The famous scene in the sixth book of the "Iliad," when Hector's infant, Astyanax, screams at the sight of his father's waving crest, and the hero lays his helmet on the ground that he may laugh and weep over the child; the love and tenderness of Andromache, and her pathetic laments in the twenty-second book--are familiar to all. She foresees the hardships and unkindnesses to her orphan boy, "who was wont upon his father's knees to eat the purest marrow and the rich fat of sheep; and when sleep came upon him, and he ceased his childish play, he would lie in the arms of his nurse, on a soft cushion, satisfied with every comfort." So, again, a protecting goddess is compared to a mother keeping the flies from her sleeping infant, and a pertinacious friend to a little girl who, running beside her mother, begs to be taken up, holding her dress and delaying her, and with tearful eyes the child keeps looking up till the mother denies her no longer. These are only stray references, and yet they speak no less clearly than if we had asked for an express answer to a direct inquiry. So we have the hesitation of the murderers sent to make away with the infant Cypselus, who had been foretold to portend danger to the Corinthian Herods of that day. The smile of the baby unmans--or should we rather say unbrutes?--the first ruffian, and so the task is passed on from man to man. This story in Herodotus is a sort of natural Greek parallel to the great Shakespearian scene, where another child sways his intended torturer with an eloquence more conscious and explicit, but not, perhaps, more powerful, than the radiant smile of the Greek baby. Thus Euripides, the great master of pathos, represents Iphigenia bringing her infant brother Orestes to plead for her with that unconsciousness of sorrow which pierces us to the heart more than the most affecting rhetoric. In modern art a little child, playing about its dead mother, and waiting with contentment for her awaking, is perhaps the most powerful appeal to human compassion which we are able to conceive.

On the other hand, the troubles of infancy were then as now very great. We do not, indeed, hear of croup or teething or measles or whooping-cough. But these are occasional matters, and count as nothing beside the inexorable tyranny of a sleepless baby. For then as now mothers and nurses had a strong prejudice in favor of carrying about restless children, and so soothing them to sleep. The unpractical Plato requires that in his fabulous Republic two or three stout nurses shall be in readiness to carry about each child, because children, like game-cocks, gain spirit and endurance by this treatment! What they really gain is a gigantic power of torturing their mothers. Most children can readily be taught to sleep in a bed, or even in an arm-chair; but an infant once accustomed to being carried about will insist upon it; and so it came that Greek husbands were obliged to relegate their wives to another sleeping-room, where the nightly squalling of the furious infant might not disturb the master as well as the mistress of the house. But the Greek gentleman was able to make good his damaged rest by a mid-day siesta, and so required but little sleep at night. The modern father in Northern Europe, with his whole day's work and waking, is therefore in a more disadvantageous position.

Of course, very fashionable people kept nurses, and it was the highest tone at Athens to have a Spartan nurse for the infant, just as an English nurse is sought out among foreign noblesse. We are told that these women made the child hardier, that they used less swathing and bandaging, and allowed free play for the limbs; and this, like all the Spartan physical training, was approved of and admired by the rest of the Greek public, though its imitation was never suggested save in the unpractical speculations of Plato.

Whether they also approved of a diet of marrow and mutton suet, which Homer, in the passage just cited, considers the luxury of princes, does not appear. As Homer was the Greek Bible--an inspired book containing perfect wisdom on all things, human and divine--there must have been many orthodox parents who followed his prescription. But we hear no approval or censure of such diet. Possibly marrow may have represented our cod-liver oil in strengthening delicate infants. But as the Homeric men fed far more exclusively on meat than their historical successors, some vegetable substitute, such as olive oil, must have been in use later on. Even within our memory mutton suet boiled in milk was commonly recommended by physicians for the delicacy now treated by cod-liver oil. The supposed strengthening of children by air and exposure, or by early neglect of their comforts, was as fashionable at Sparta as it is with many modern theorists, and it probably led in both cases to the same result--the extinction of the weak and delicate. These theorists parade the cases of survival of stout children--that is, their exceptional soundness--as the effect of this harsh treatment, and so satisfy themselves that experience confirms their views. Now with the Spartans this was logical enough, for as they professed and desired nothing but physical results, as they despised intellectual qualities, and esteemed obedience to be the highest of moral ones, they were perhaps justified in their proceeding. So thoroughly did they advocate the production of healthy citizens for military purposes that they were quite content that the sickly should die. In fact, in the case of obviously weak and deformed infants, they did not hesitate to expose them in the most brutal sense, not to cold and draughts, but to the wild beasts in the mountains.

? 8. This brings us to the first shocking contrast between the Greek treatment of children and ours. We cannot really doubt, from the free use of the idea in Greek tragedies, in the comedies of ordinary life, and in theories of political economy, that the exposing of new-born children was not only sanctioned by public feeling, but actually practised throughout Greece. Various motives combined to justify or to extenuate this practice. In the first place, the infant was regarded as the property of its parents, indeed of its father, to an extent inconceivable to most modern Christians. The State only, whose claim overrode all other considerations, had a right, for public reasons, to interfere with the dispositions of a father. Individual human life had not attained what may be called the exaggerated value derived from sundry superstitions, which remains even after those superstitions have decayed. And, moreover, in many Greek states, the contempt for commercial pursuits, and the want of outlet for practical energy, made the supporting of large families cumbersome, or the subdivision of patrimonies excessive. Hence the prudence or the selfishness of parents did not hesitate to use an escape which modern civilization condemns as not only criminal, but as horribly cruel. How little even the noblest Greek theorists felt this objection appears from the fact that Plato, the Attic Moses, sanctions infanticide under certain circumstances or in another form, in his ideal state. In the genteel comedy it is often mentioned as a somewhat painful necessity, but enjoined by prudence. Nowhere does the agony of the mother's heart reach us through their literature, save in one illustration used by the Platonic Socrates, where he compares the anger of his pupils, when first confuted out of their prejudices, to the fury of a young mother deprived of her first infant. There is something horrible in the very allusion, as if in after-life Attic mothers became hardened to this treatment. We must suppose the exposing of female infants to have been not uncommon until the just retribution of barrenness fell upon the nation, and the population dwindled away by a strange atrophy.

But the women's apartments, in which children were kept for the first few years, are closed so completely to us that we can but conjecture a few things about the life and care of Greek babies. A few late epigrams tell the grief of parents bereaved of their infants. Beyond this, classical literature affords us no light. The backwardness in culture of Greek women leads us to suspect that then, as now, Greek babies were more often spoiled than is the case among the serious Northern nations. The term "Spartan mother" is, however, still proverbial; and, no doubt, in that exceptional State discipline was so universal and so highly esteemed that it penetrated even to the nursery. But in the rest of Greece we may conceive the young child arriving at his schoolboy age more wilful and headstrong than most of our more watched and worried infants. Archytas, the philosopher, earned special credit for inventing the rattle, and saving much damage to household furniture by occupying children with this toy.

FOOTNOTES:

? 130.

? 7.

Herod. v. 93.

Exposing children, instead of killing them, left open the chance that some benevolent person would save them, from pity, or avaricious person sell them as slaves--a result which, no doubt, often occurred. Thus the parents could console their consciences with a hope that the benevolence of the gods had prevented the natural consequences of their inhuman act.

EARLIER CHILDHOOD.

Owing to these causes, we find the theorists discussing, as they now do, the expediency of waiting till the age of seven before beginning serious education--some advising it, others recommending easy and half-playing lessons from an earlier period. And then, as now, we find the same curious silence on the really important fact that the exact number of years a child has lived is nothing to the point in question; and that while one child may be too young at seven to commence work, many more may be distinctly too old.

? 11. At all events, we may assume in parents the same varieties of over-anxiety, of over-indulgence, of nervousness, and of carelessness about their children; and so it doubtless came to pass that there was in many cases a gap between infancy and school-life, which was spent in playing and doing mischief. This may be fairly inferred, not only from such anecdotes as that of Alcibiades playing with his fellows in the street, evidently without the protection of any paedagogue, but also from the large nomenclature of boys' games preserved to us in the glossaries of later grammarians.

There was tossing in a blanket, walking on stilts, swinging, leap-frog, and many other similar plays, which are ill-understood, and worse explained, by the learned, and of no importance to us, save as proving the general similarity of the life of little boys then as now.

? 12. Most unfortunately, there is hardly a word left of the nursery rhymes and of the folk-lore, which are very much more interesting than the physical amusements of children. Yet we know that such popular songs existed in plenty; we know, too, from the early fame of AEsop's fables, from the myths so readily invented and exquisitely told by Plato, that here we have lost a real fund of beautiful and stimulating children's stories. And of course here, too, the general character of such stories throughout the human race was preserved.

FOOTNOTES:

Plut. "Alkib.," c. 2.

This seems to be the interpretation of "Achar." 920 sq., according to Grasberger.

ix. 103.

I do not know whether so late an authority is valid proof for the early Greek origin of a game. Most certainly the polo played at Constantinople at the same time came from an equestrian people, and not from the Greeks.

SCHOOL DAYS--THE PHYSICAL SIDE.

? 13. The most striking difference between early Greek education and ours was undoubtedly this, that the physical development of boys was attended to in a special place and by a special master. It was not thought sufficient for them to play the chance games of childhood; they underwent careful bodily training under a very fixed system, which was determined by the athletic contests of after-life. This feature, which excites the admiration of the modern Germans, and has given rise to an immense literature, is doubtless all the more essential now that the mental training of our boys has become so much more trying; and we can quite feel, when we look at the physical development of ordinary foreigners, how keenly they must envy the freedom of limb and ease of motion, not only as we see it suggested by Greek statues, but as we have it before us in the ordinary sporting Englishman. But it is quite in accordance with their want of practical development, that while they write immense books about the physical training of the Greeks, and the possibility of imitating it in modern education, they seem quite ignorant of that side of English education at our public schools; and yet there they might see in practice a physical education in no way inferior to that described in classical authors. I say it quite deliberately--the public-school boy, who is trained in cricket, football, and rowing, and who in his holidays can obtain riding, salmon-fishing, hunting, and shooting, enjoys a physical training which no classical days ever equalled. The athletic part of this training is enjoyed by all boys at our public schools, though the field sports at home only fall to the lot of the richer or more fortunate.

? 14. When we compare what the Greeks afforded to their boys, we find it divided into two contrasted kinds of exercise: hunting, which was practised by the Spartans very keenly, and no doubt also by the Eleans and Arcadians, as may be seen from Xenophon's "Tract on Hunting;" and gymnastics, which in the case of boys were carried on in the so-called palaestra, a sort of open-air gymnasium kept by private individuals as a speculation, and to which the boys were sent, as they were to their ordinary schoolmaster. We find that the Spartans, who had ample scope for hunting with dogs in the glens and coverts of Mount Taygetus, rather despised mere exercises of dexterity in the palaestra, just as our sportsmen would think very little of spending hours in a gymnasium. But those Greeks who lived in towns like Athens, and in the midst of a thickly populated and well-cultivated country, could not possibly obtain hunting, and therefore found the most efficient substitute.

Still, we find them very far behind the English in their knowledge or taste for out-of-door games, such as cricket, football, hockey, golf, etc.--games which combine chance and skill, which combine strength with dexterity, and which intensely interest the players while keeping them in the open air. Yachting, though there were regattas, was not in fashion in ancient Greece. Rowing, which they could have practised to their heart's content, and which was of the last importance in their naval warfare, was never thought gentlemanly, and always consigned to slaves or hirelings. There are, indeed, as above quoted from Pollux, descriptions of something like football and lacrosse, but the obscurity and rarity of any allusions to them show that they are in no sense national games. Running races round a short course was one of their chief exercises, but this is no proper out-of-door game.

But the Greeks had no playgrounds beyond the palaestra or gymnasium; they had no playgrounds in our sense; and though a few proverbs speak of swimming as a universal accomplishment which boys learned, the silence of Greek literature on the subject makes one very suspicious as to the generality of such training.

With this introduction, we may turn to some details as to the education of Greek boys in their palaestra.

There is no evidence to decide the point whether the boys went to this establishment at the same age that they went to school, and at a different hour of the day, or at a different age, taking their physical and mental education separately. And even in this latter case we are left in doubt which side obtained the priority. The best authorities among the Germans decide on separate ages for palaestra and school, and put the palaestra first. But in the face of many uncertainties, and some evidence the other way, the common-sense view is preferable that both kinds of instruction were given together, though we know nothing about the distribution of the day, save that both are asserted to have begun very early. Even the theoretical schemes of Plato and Aristotle do not help us here, and it is one of those many points which are now lost on account of their being once so perfectly obvious and familiar.

? 20. There remain little or no details as to the exact rules of training practised in the ordinary palaestras, but we may fairly assume them to have been the same in kind as those approved for formal athletes. If we judge from these, we will not form a high idea of Greek training. Pausanias informs us that they trained on dry cheese, which is not surprising, as they were not a very carnivorous people. But when a known athlete discovered that meat diet was the best, they seem to have followed up the discovery by inferring that the more of a good thing the better; and so athletes were required to eat very large quantities of meat, owing to which they were lazy and sleepy when not engaged in active work. We need not suppose that the diet of ordinary boys was in any way interfered with, but this particular case shows the crude notions which prevailed, and the trainer came more and more to assume the part of a dietetic doctor, as is stated by Plato.

FOOTNOTES:

Herodotus, indeed , speaks of the generality of Greek sailors as able to swim.

Paus. vi. 7, 9.

It was a curious rule at the Olympic games that the competitors were even compelled to swear that they had spent a month in training at Elis, as if it mattered whether the victory was won by natural endowments only or by careful study. One would have thought that the importance of the contest would insure ample training in those who desired to win.

Cf., for example, Grasberger, "Erziehung," etc., iii. 212, quoting Cicero, "Tusc. Disp.," ii. 23, 26.

SCHOOL DAYS--THE MUSICAL SIDE--THE SCHOOLMASTER.

? 24. We will approach this side of the question by quoting the famous description of Greek education in Plato's "Protagoras," which will recall to the reader the general problem, so apt to be lost or obscured amid details. "Education and admonition commence in the very first years of childhood, and last to the very end of life. Mother and nurse and father and tutor are quarrelling about the improvement of the child as soon as ever he is able to understand them. He cannot say or do anything without their setting forth to him that this is just and that is unjust; that this is honorable, that is dishonorable; this is holy, that is unholy; do this, and abstain from that. And if he obeys, well and good; if not, he is straightened by threats and blows, like a piece of warped wood. At a later stage they send him to teachers, and enjoin them to see to his manners even more than to his reading and music; and the teachers do as they are desired. And when the boy has learned his letters, and is beginning to understand what is written, as before he understood only what was spoken, they put into his hands the works of great poets, which he reads at school; in these are contained many admonitions, and many tales and praises, and encomia of ancient famous men, which he is required to learn by heart, in order that he may imitate or emulate them, and desire to become like them. Then, again, the teachers of the lyre take similar care that their young disciple is steady and gets into no mischief; and when they have taught him the use of the lyre, they introduce him to the works of other excellent poets, who are the lyric poets; and these they set to music, and make their harmonies and rhythms quite familiar to the children, in order that they may learn to be more gentle and harmonious and rhythmical, and so more fitted for speech and action; for the life of man in every part has need of harmony and rhythm. Then they send them to the master of gymnastics, in order that their bodies may better minister to the virtuous mind, and that the weakness of their bodies may not force them to play the coward in war or on any other occasion. This is what is done by those who have the means, and those who have the means are the rich; their children begin education soonest and leave off latest. When they have done with masters, the State, again, compels them to learn the laws, and live after the pattern which they furnish, and not after their own fancies; and just as in learning to write, the writing-master first draws lines with a stylus for the use of the young beginner, and gives him the tablet, and makes him follow the lines, so the city draws the laws, which were the invention of good lawgivers which were of old time; these are given to the young man in order to guide him in his conduct, whether as ruler or ruled; and he who transgresses them is to be corrected or called to account, which is a term used not only in your country, but in many others."

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