The History Of Education by Ellwood P. Cubberley (epub e reader .txt) 📖
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7. Why does a state military socialism, such as prevailed at Sparta, tend to produce a people of mediocre intellectual capacity?
8. How do you account for the Athenian State leaving literary and musical education to private initiative, but supporting state gymnasia?
9. Would the Athenian method of instruction have been possible had all children in the State been given an education? Why?
10. How did the education of an Athenian girl differ from that of a girl in the early American colonies?
11. Why did the Greek boy need three teachers, whereas the American boy is taught all and more by one primary teacher?
12. Contrast the Greek method of instruction in music, and the purposes of the instruction, with our own.
13. How could we incorporate into our school instruction some of the important aspects of Greek instruction in music?
14. What do you think of the contentions of Aristotle and Plato that the State should control school music as a means of securing sound moral instruction?
15. Does the Greek idea that a harmonious personal development contributes to moral worth appeal to you? Why?
16. Contrast the Greek ideal as to athletic training with the conception of athletics held by an average American schoolboy.
17. Contrast the education of a Greek boy at sixteen with that of an American boy at the same age.
18. Contrast the emphasis placed on expression as a method in teaching in the schools of Athens and of the United States.
19. Do the needs of modern society and industrial life warrant the greater emphasis we place on learning from books, as opposed to the learning by doing of the Greeks?
20. Compare the compulsory-school period of the Greeks with our own. If we were to add some form of compulsory military training, for all youths between eighteen and twenty, and as a preparedness measure, would we approach still more nearly the Greek requirements?
21. Explain how the Athenian Greeks reconciled the idea of social service to the State with the idea of individual liberty, through a form of education which developed personality. Compare this with our American ideal.
22. The Greek schoolboy had no long summer vacation, as do American children. Is there any special reason why we need it more than did they?
23. Do we believe that virtue can be taught in the way the Hellenic peoples did? Do we carry such a belief into practice?
SELECTED READINGS
In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are reproduced:
1. Plutarch: Ancient Education in Sparta.
2. Plato: An Athenian Schoolboy’s Life.
3. Lucian: An Athenian Schoolboy’s Day.
4. Aristotle: Athenian Citizenship and the Ephebic Years.
5. Freeman: Sparta and Athens compared.
6. Thucydides: Athenian Education summarized.
QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS
1. Describe and characterize the Laws which Lycurgus framed for Spartan training (1).
2. Describe and characterize the instruction of the Ireus at Sparta.
Compare with the training given among the best of the American Indian tribes (1).
3. Contrast the type of education given an Athenian and a Spartan boy, as to nature and purpose and character (1 and 2).
4. What degree of State supervision of education is indicated by Plato (2)? By Freeman (5)?
5. Compare an Athenian school day as described by Lucian (3) with a school day in a modern Gary-type school.
6. Compare the Ephebic years of an Athenian youth (4) with those of a Spartan youth (1).
7. What were some of the chief defects of Athenian schools (5)?
8. What was the position of the State in the matter of the education of youth (5)?
9. What were the great merits of the Athenian educational and political system of training (6)?
(For SUPPLEMENTAL REFERENCES, see following chapter.)
LATER GREEK EDUCATION
III. THE NEW GREEK EDUCATION
POLITICAL EVENTS: THE GOLDEN AGE OF GREECE. The Battle of Marathon (490
B.C.) has long been considered one of the “decisive battles of the world.”
Had the despotism of the East triumphed here, and in the subsequent campaign that ended in the defeat of the Persian fleet at Salamis (480
B.C.) and of the Persian army at Plataea (479 B.C.), the whole history of our western world would have been different. The result of the war with Persia was the triumph of this new western democratic civilization, prepared and schooled for great national emergencies by a severe but effective training, over the uneducated hordes led to battle by the autocracy of the East. This was the first, but not the last, of the many battles which western democracy and civilization has had to fight to avoid being crushed by autocracy and despotism. Marathon broke the dread spell of the Persian name and freed the more progressive Greeks to pursue their intellectual and political development. Above all it revealed the strength and power of the Athenians to themselves, and in the half-century following the most wonderful political, literary, and artistic development the world had ever known ensued, and the highest products of Greek civilization were attained. Attica had braved everything for the common cause of Greece, even to leaving Athens to be burned by the invader, and for the next fifty years she held the position of political as well as cultural pre�minence among the Greek City-States. Athens now became the world center of wealth and refinement and the home of art and literature (R. 7), and her influence along cultural lines, due in part to her mastery of the sea and her growing commerce, was now extended throughout the Mediterranean world.
From 479 to 431 B.C. was the Golden Age of Greece, and during this short period Athens gave birth to more great men—poets, artists, statesmen, and philosophers—than all the world beside had produced [1] in any period of equal length. Then, largely as a result of the growing jealousy of military Sparta came that cruel and vindictive civil strife, known as the Peloponnesian War, which desolated Greece, left Athens a wreck of her former self, permanently lowered the moral tone of the Greek people, and impaired beyond recovery the intellectual and artistic life of Hellas. For many centuries Athens continued to be a center of intellectual achievement, and to spread her culture throughout a new and a different world, but her power as a State had been impaired forever by a revengeful war between those who should have been friends and allies in the cause of civilization.
TRANSITION FROM OLD TO THE NEW. As early as 509 B.C. a new constitution had admitted all the free inhabitants of Attica to citizenship, and the result was a rapid increase in the prestige, property, and culture of Athens. Citizenship was now open to the commercial classes, and no longer restricted to a small, properly born, and properly educated class. Wealth now became important in giving leisure to the citizen, and was no longer looked down upon as it had been in the earlier period. After the Peloponnesian War the predominance of Attica among the Greek States, the growth of commerce, the constant interchange of embassies, the travel overseas of Athenian citizens, and the presence of many foreigners in the State all alike led to a tolerance of new ideas and a criticism of old ones which before had been unknown. A leisure class now arose, and personal interest came to have a larger place than before, with a consequent change in the earlier conceptions as to the duty of the citizen to the State. Literature lost much of its earlier religious character, and the religious basis of morality [2] began to be replaced by that of reason. Philosophy was now called upon to furnish a practical guide for life to replace the old religious basis. A new philosophy in which “man was the measure of all things” arose, and its teachers came to have large followings. The old search for an explanation of the world of matter [3]
was now replaced by an attempt to explain the world of ideas and emotions, with a resulting evolution of the sciences of philosophy, ethics, and logic. It was a period of great intellectual as well as political change and expansion, and in consequence the old education, which had answered well the needs of a primitive and isolated community, now found itself but poorly adapted to meet the larger needs of the new cosmopolitan State. [4]
The result was a material change in the old education to adapt it to the needs of the new Athens, now become the intellectual center of the civilized world.
CHANGES IN THE OLD EDUCATION. A number of changes in the character of the old education were now gradually introduced. The rigid drill of the earlier period began to be replaced by an easier and a more pleasurable type of training. Gymnastics for personal enjoyment began to replace drill for the service of the State, and was much less rigid in type. The old authors, who had rendered important service in the education of youth, began to be replaced by more modern writers, with a distinct loss of the earlier religious and moral force. New musical instruments, giving a softer and more pleasurable effect, took the place of the seven-stringed lyre, and complicated music replaced the simple Doric airs of the earlier period. Education became much more individual, literary, and theoretical.
Geometry and drawing were introduced as new studies. Grammar and rhetoric began to be studied, discussion was introduced, and a certain glibness of speech began to be prized. The citizen-cadet years, from sixteen to twenty, formerly devoted to rather rigorous physical training, were now changed to school work of an intellectual type.
NEW TEACHERS; THE SOPHISTS. New teachers, known as Sophists, who professed to be able to train men for a political career, [5] began to offer a more practical course designed to prepare boys for the newer type of state service. These in time drew many Ephebes into their private schools, where the chief studies were on the content, form, and practical use of the Greek language. Rhetoric and grammar before long became the master studies of this new period, as they were felt to prepare boys better for the new political and intellectual life of Hellas than did the older type of training. In the schools of the Sophists boys now spent their time in forming phrases, choosing words, examining grammatical structure, and learning how to secure rhetorical effect. Many of these new teachers made most extravagant claims for their instruction (R. 8) and drew much ridicule from the champions of the older type of education, but within a century they had thoroughly established themselves, and had permanently changed the character of the earlier Greek education.
By 350 B.C. we find that Greek school education had been differentiated into three divisions, as follows:
1. Primary education, covering the years from seven or eight to thirteen, and embracing reading, writing, arithmetic, and chanting.
The teacher of this school came to be known as a grammatist.
2. Secondary education, covering the years from thirteen to sixteen, and embracing geometry, drawing, and a special music course. Later on some grammar and rhetoric were introduced into this school. The teacher of this school came to be known as a grammaticus.
3. Higher or university education, covering the years after sixteen.
THE FLOOD OF INDIVIDUALISM. This period of artistic and intellectual brilliancy of Greece following the Peloponnesian War marked the beginning of the end of Greece politically. The war was a blow to the strength of Greece from which the different States never recovered. Greece was bled white by this needless civil strife. The tendencies toward individualism in education were symptomatic of
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