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

lived on the land and among a people just passing through the earliest stages of settled and civilized life. In a way the inheritors of the agricultural and handicraft knowledge of the Romans, the monks became the most skillful artisans and farmers to be found, and from them these arts in time reached the developing peasantry around them. Their work and services have been well summed up by the same author just quoted, as follows: It was mainly by the monasteries that to the peasant class of Europe was pointed out the way of civilization. The devotions and charities; the austerities of the brethren; their abstemious meal; their meager clothing, the cheapest of the country in which they lived; their shaven heads, or the cowl which shut out the sight of sinful objects; the long staff in their hands; their naked feet and legs; their passing forth on their journeys by twos, each a watch on his brother; the prohibitions against eating outside of the wall of the monastery, which had its own mill, its own bakehouse, and whatever was needed in an abstemious domestic economy (Figure 38); their silent hospitality to the wayfarer, who was refreshed in a separate apartment; the lands around their buildings turned from a wilderness into a garden, and, above all, labor exalted and ennobled by their holy hands, and celibacy, forever, in the eye of the vulgar, a proof of separation from the world and a sacrifice to heaven—these were the things that arrested the attention of the barbarians of Europe, and led them on to civilization. [14]

 

THE PROBLEM FACED BY THE MIDDLE AGES. That the lamp of learning burned low during this period of assimilation is no cause for wonder. Recovery from such a deluge of barbarism on a weakened society is not easy. In fact the recovery was a long and slow process, occupying nearly the whole of a thousand years. The problem which faced the Church, as the sole surviving force capable of exerting any constructive influence, was that of changing the barbarism and anarchy of the sixth century, with its low standards of living and lack of humane ideals, into the intelligent, progressive civilization of the fifteenth century. This was the work of the Middle Ages, and largely the work of the Christian Church. It was not a period of progress, but one of assimilation, so that a common western civilization might in time be developed out of the diverse and hostile elements mixed together by the rude force of circumstances. The enfeebled Roman race was to be reinvigorated by mixture with the youthful and vigorous Germans (R.

50); to the institutions of ancient society were to be added certain social and political institutions of the Germanic peoples; all were to be brought under the rule of a common Christian Church; and finally, when these people had become sufficiently civilized and educated to enable them to understand and appreciate, “nearly every achievement of the Greeks and the Romans in thought, science, law, and the practical arts” was to be recovered and made a part of our western civilization.

 

In this chapter we have dealt largely with the great fundamental movements which have so deeply influenced the course of human history. In the chapters which immediately follow we shall tell how learning was preserved during the period and what facilities for education actually existed; trace the more important efforts made to re�stablish schools and learning; and finally describe the culmination of the process of absorbing and educating the Germans in the civilization they had conquered that came in the great period of recovery of the ancient learning and civilization—the age of the Renaissance.

 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

 

1. Do the peculiar problems of assimilation of the foreign-born, revealed to us by the World War, put us in a somewhat similar position to Rome under the Empire as relates to the need of a guiding national faith?

 

2. Outline how Rome might have been helped and strengthened by a national school system under state control.

 

3. Outline how our state school systems could be made much more effective as national instruments by the infusion into their instruction of a strong national faith.

 

4. Try to picture the results upon our civilization had western Europe become Mohammedan.

 

5. The movement of new peoples into the Roman Empire was much slower than has been the immigration of foreign peoples into the United States, since 1840. Why the difference in assimilative power?

 

6. How do you think the Roman provinces and Italy, after the tribes from the North had settled down within the Empire, compared with Mexico after the years of revolution with peons and brigands in control? With Russia, after the destruction wrought by the Bolshevists?

 

7. Explain the importance of the long civilizing and educating work of Rome among the German tribes, in preparing the means for the preservation of Roman institutions after the downfall of the Roman government.

 

8. What does the fact that Roman institutions and Roman thinking continued and profoundly modified mediaeval life indicate as to the nature of Roman government and the Roman power of assimilation?

 

9. Though Rome never instituted a state school system, was there not after all large educational work done by the government through its intelligent administration?

 

10. Show how the breakdown of Roman government and Roman institutions was naturally more complete in Gaul than in northern Italy, and more complete in northern than in central or southern Italy, and hence how Roman civilization was naturally preserved in larger measure in the cities of Italy than elsewhere.

 

11. Show how the Christian Church, too, could not have completely dispensed with Roman letters and Roman civilization, had it desired to do so, but was forced of necessity to preserve and pass on important portions of the civilization of Rome.

 

12. What do you think would have been the effect on the future of civilization had the barbarian tribes overrun Spain, Italy, and Greece during the Age of Pericles?

 

13. What modern analogies do we have to the civilizing work of the monks and clergy during the Middle Ages?

 

14. Picture the work of the monasteries in handing on to western Europe the arts and handicrafts and skilled occupations of Rome. Cite some examples.

 

15. What civilizing problem, somewhat comparable to that of barbarian Europe, have we faced in our national history? Why have we been able to obtain results so much more rapidly?

 

SELECTED READINGS

 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are reproduced:

 

46. Caesar: The Hunting Germans and their Fighting Ways.

47. Tacitus: The Germans and their Domestic Habits.

48. Dill: Effect on the Roman World of the News of the Sacking of Rome by Alaric.

49. Giry and Reville: Fate of the Old Roman Towns.

50. Kingsley: The Invaders, and what they brought.

51. General Form for a Grant of Immunity to a Bishop.

52. Charlemagne: Powers and Immunities granted to the Monastery of Saint Marcellus.

 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS

 

1. State the differences in character Caesar observes (46) between the Gauls to the west of the Rhine and the Germans to the east.

 

2. What German characteristics that Tacitus describes (47) would prove good additions to Roman life?

 

3. Do the emotions of Saint Jerome on hearing of the sacking of Rome (48) reveal anything as to the extent to which the Roman had become a Churchman and the Churchman a Roman? Illustrate.

 

4. Is it probable that a quarter-century of Bolsheviki rule in Russia would produce results comparable to those described by Giry and R�ville (49)?

 

5. Is Kingsley right in stating (50) that the best elements of all the modern European peoples came from the barbarian invaders? State what seem to you to be the important contributions of barbarian invader, Roman, and Churchman.

 

6. Do the grants of privileges and immunities shown in the general form (51)and the specific form (52) seem to follow naturally from the earlier grants to physicians and teachers (26) and to the clergy (38)? Point out the relationship.

 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES

 

* Adams, G. B. Civilization during the Middle Ages.

Church, R. W. The Beginnings of the Middle Ages.

Kingsley, Chas. The Roman and Teuton.

* Thorndike, Lynn. History of Mediaeval Europe.