The History Of Education by Ellwood P. Cubberley (epub e reader .txt) 📖

“one learned not only through the ears, but through the eyes. The young, in observing the elders, learned what they would soon have to do themselves, and what they would one day teach to their successor.”

 

[10] Such careful physical training as was given in a Greek palaestra

and gymnasium would have been regarded by the Romans as most effeminate.

Unlike the Greeks, who strove for a harmonious bodily development, the Romans exercised for usefulness in war. Cicero exclaims, with reference to Greek gymnasial training: “What an absurd system of training youth is exhibited in their gymnasia! What a frivolous preparation for the labors and hazards of war!”

 

[11] Macaulay, in his Horatius, describes the results of the education of this early period as follows:

 

“Then none were for the party,

But all were for the State;

And the rich man loved the poor,

And the poor man loved the great.

Then lands were fairly portioned

And spoils were fairly sold;

For the Romans were like brothers

In the brave days of old.”

 

[12] “The Romans,” says the historian Wilhelm Ihne, “were distinguished from all other nations, not only by the extreme earnestness and precision with which they conceived their law and worked out the consequences of its fundamental principles, but by the good sense which made them submit to the law, once established, as an absolute necessity of political health and strength. It was this severity in thinking and acting which, more than any other cause, made Rome great and powerful.”

 

[13] The lot of a captive in war, everywhere throughout the ancient world, was to be taken and sold as a slave by his captors. Many educated Greeks were thus taken in the capture of Greek cities in southern Italy and sold as slaves in Rome. These were let out by their masters as teachers of the new learning. Even the thrifty Cato, who vigorously opposed the new learning on principle, was not averse to permitting his educated Greek slaves to conduct schools and thus add to his private fortune.

 

[14] These men had little choice otherwise. Grain from Spain and Africa became so cheap that a farmer could not raise enough on his small farm to pay his taxes and support his family, so he was obliged to sell his land to men who turned it into large cattle and sheep ranches. He would not emigrate to the provinces, as Englishmen have done to Canada and Australia, but instead went to the cities, where he led a hand-to-mouth existence in a type of tenement house. It was from such sources that the Roman mob, demanding free grain and entertainment in return for its votes, was made up.

 

[15] Arithmetic was not easy for the Romans, partly because they had no figure or other sign for zero, partly because they used a decimal system for counting and a duodecimal for their money, and partly because the Roman system of notation (I, V, X, L, C, D, M) did not adapt itself to quick calculation. Try, for example, these simple sums: Add: CCLVII Subtract: LXVIII CIX XXXIV

–– ––

Multiply: CXXV Divide: XII |CXXXII XII ––

–-

[16] Finger reckoning (whence digits) with the Romans attained a prominence probably never reached with any other people. Bills and accounts were reckoned up on the fingers, in the presence of the patron.

Eighteen positions of the fingers of the left hand stood for the nine units and the nine tens, and eighteen positions of the fingers of the right hand stood for the nine hundreds and the nine thousands. For larger sums, such as ten thousand and more, various parts of the body were touched. Any one who betrayed, according to Quintilian, “by an uncertain or awkward movement of his fingers, a want of confidence in his calculations,” was thought to be but imperfectly trained in arithmetic.

 

[17] There was much complaint that parents were slow with their fees, and at times forgot them entirely if the boy did not turn out well. Finally, in the reign of Diocletian (284-305 A.D.), in an effort to relieve the distress of schoolmasters, prices were legally fixed at approximately the equivalent of $1.20 per month per pupil for teaching reading and $1.80 for arithmetic, measured in money values of a decade ago. These were regarded as “hard times prices.”

 

[18] “Reading aloud, with careful attention to pronunciation, accent, quantity, and expression, formed an important part of the training in literature of a Latin youth. Correct reading of Latin was a much more difficult art, as practiced, than is the reading of English, as all of us well know who learned properly to intone our “Arma virumque cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris Italiam, fato profugus, Lavinaque venit.”

 

The lack of use of small letters and spacing between the words (R. 21), as well as poor punctuation, also added to the difficulty.

 

[19] A nonsensical minuteness was followed here, and many trivialities were emphasized. Juvenal tells us, in his Seventh Satire, written about 130 A.D., that “a teacher was expected to read all histories and know all authors as well as his finger ends. That, if questioned, he should be able to tell the name of Anchises’ nurse, and the name and native land of the stepmother of Anchemotus—tell how many years Acestes lived—how many flagons of wine the Sicilian king gave to the Phrygians.” This reminds us of some of the dissected study of English and Latin until recently given in our colleges and high schools.

 

[20] Quintilian well states the aim of this higher education when he says that “the man who can duly sustain his character as a citizen, who is qualified for the management of public and private affairs, and who can govern communities by his counsels, settle them by means of laws, and improve them by judicial enactments, can certainly be nothing else but an orator.”

 

[21] In his Lives of Eminent Grammarians and Rhetoricians, chap. I.

Suetonius lived from 75 to 160 A.D., and was an advocate at Rome and private secretary to the Emperor Hadrian.

 

[22] There was a general dread of Greek higher learning on the part of the older Romans, and this found expression in many ways. Among these was an edict of the Senate, in 161 B.C., directing the Praetor to see that “no philosophers or rhetoricians be suffered at Rome” (R. 20), a decree which could not be enforced, and the edict of the Censors, in 92 B.C. (R. 20), expressing their disapproval of the Latin schools of rhetoric.

 

[23] These seven studies became the famous studies of the church schools of the Middle Ages, with Grammar as the greatest and most important study (see chap. VII; R. 74). The curriculum of the Middle Ages was a direct inheritance from Rome.

 

[24] See Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, book I, chap. X, 22, 37, and 46. This chapter is devoted largely to a description of the use of these studies.

 

[25] Sample questions which were debated to bring out the fine distinctions in Roman Law and Ethics were: (a) Was a slave about whose neck a master had hung the leather or golden token (worn by free youths only), in order to smuggle him past the boundary, freed when he reached Roman soil wearing this insignia of freedom?

 

(b) If a stranger buys a prospective draught of fishes and the fisherman draws up a casket of jewels, does the stranger own the jewels?

 

[26] In the later centuries of the Empire, people went to hear a man who could orate or declaim, as people now do to hear a great political orator, a revivalist preacher, or a popular actor or singer. A form of amusement for distinguished travelers passing through a city was to have some one orate before them. “This power of using words for mere pleasurable effect,” says Professor Dill, in his Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, “on the most trivial or the most extravagantly absurd themes, was for many ages, in both West and East, esteemed the highest proof of talent and cultivation.”

 

[27] Each Greek rhetorician in Rome was given one hundred sestertia

(about $4000) yearly from the Imperial Treasury, Quintilian probably being one of the first to receive a state salary.

 

[28] “He [Claudius] was also attentive to provide a liberal education for the sons of their chieftains;… and his attempts were attended with such success that they, who lately disdained to make use of the Roman language, were now ambitious of becoming eloquent. Hence the Roman habit began to be held in honor, and the toga was frequently worn.” Tacitus’s Account of Britain, Agricola, chap. 21.

 

[29] England offers us the nearest modern analogy. This was one of the last of the great European nations to establish popular education, but for centuries previous thereto the great private, tuition, grammar schools of England—Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, and others—together with the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, prepared a succession of leaders for the State—men who have steered England’s destinies at home and abroad and made her a great world power.

 

[30] This grew up, as all law grows, by enacted laws and decisions of the courts, and in time came to be an enormous body of law. Lacking the printed law books and indices of to-day, to obtain a knowledge of Roman law became a formidable task. Finally the practical Roman mind codified it, and reduced it to system and order. The Theodosian Code, of 438 A.D., and the Justinian Code, of 528 and 534 A.D., were the final results. These codes were compact, capable of duplication with relative ease, and later became the standard textbooks throughout the Middle Ages. The great importance of these codifications may be appreciated when we know that almost all the original laws and decisions from which they were compiled have been lost.

 

[31] The Romanic countries—France, Spain, Italy—have drawn their law most completely from the Justinian Code. Due to Spanish and French occupation of parts of America, Roman legal ideas also entered here, the Louisiana Code of 1824 being Roman in law and technical expressions and spirit, though English in language. Spanish and Portuguese settlement of the South American continent has carried Roman law there.

 

[32] The Roman alphabet is the alphabet of all North and South America, Australia, Africa, and all of Europe except Russia, Greece, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and a few minor Slavic and Teutonic peoples. Even in Germany and Austria, Roman letters were rapidly superseding the more difficult German letters in the printing of papers and books for the better-educated classes before the Great War. In India, Siam, China, and Japan, Roman letters are also being increasingly used.