The History Of Education by Ellwood P. Cubberley (little red riding hood read aloud .txt) 📕

Except in science and mathematics, though, the creative ability of the earlier Greeks was now largely absent. Research, organization, and comment upon what had previously been done rather was the rule. Still much important work was done here. Books were collected, copied, and preserved, and texts were edited and purified from errors. Here grammar, criticism, prosody, and mythology were first developed into sciences. The study of archaeology was begun, and the first dictionaries were made. The translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek was begun for the benefit of the Alexandrian Jews who had forgotten their Mother tongue, this being the origin of the famous Septuagint [13] version of the Old Testament.

It is owing to these Alexandrian scholars, also, that we now possess the theory of Greek accents, and have good texts of Homer and other Greek writers.

ALEXANDRIA SAPPED IN TURN. In 30 B.C. Alexandria, too, came under Roman rule and was, in turn, gradually sapped by Rome. Greek influence continued, but the interest became largely philosophical. Ultimately Alexandria became the seat of a metaphysical school of Christian theology, and the scene of bitter religious controversies. In 330 A.D., Constantinople was founded on the site of the earlier Byzantium, and soon thereafter Greek scholars transferred their interest to it and made it a new center of Greek learning. There Greek science, literature, and philosophy were preserved for ten centuries, and later handed back to a Europe just awakening from the long intellectual night of the Middle Ages.

In 640 A.D. Alexandria was taken by the Mohammedans, and the university ceased to exist. The great library was destroyed, furnishing, it is said, “fuel sufficient for four thousand public baths for a period of six months,” and Greek learning was extinguished in the western world.

OUR DEBT TO HELLAS. As a political power the Greek States left the world nothing of importance. As a people they were too individualistic, and seemed to have a strange inability to unite for political purposes. To the new power slowly forming to the westward—Rome—was left the important task, which the Greek people were never able to accomplish, of uniting civilization into one political whole. The world conquest that Greece made was intellectual. As a result, her contribution to civilization was artistic, literary, philosophical, and scientific, but not political. The Athenian Greeks were a highly artistic and imaginative rather than a practical people. They spent their energy on other matters than government and conquest. As a result the world will be forever indebted to them for an art and a literature of incomparable beauty and richness which still charms mankind; a philosophy which deeply influenced the early Christian religion, and has ever since tinged the thinking of the western world; and for many important beginnings in scientific knowledge which were lost for ages to a world that had no interest in or use for science. So deeply has our whole western civilization been tinctured by Greek thought that one enthusiastic writer has exclaimed,—“Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin.” [14] (R.

11)

In education proper the old Athenian education offers us many lessons of importance that we of to-day may well heed. In the emphasis they placed on moral worth, education of the body as well as the mind, and moderation in all things, they were much ahead of us. Their schools became a type for the cities of the entire Mediterranean world, being found from the Black Sea south to the Persian Gulf and westward to Spain. When Rome became a world empire the Greek school system was adopted, and in modified form became dominant in Rome and throughout the provinces, while the universities of the Greek cities for long furnished the highest form of education for ambitious Roman youths. In this way Greek influence was spread throughout the Mediterranean world. The higher learning of the Greeks, preserved first at Athens and Alexandria, and later at Constantinople, was finally handed back to the western world at the time of the Italian Revival of Learning, after Europe had in part recovered from the effects of the barbarian deluge which followed the downfall of Rome.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Try to picture what might have been the result for western civilization had the small and newly-developed democratic civilization of Greece been crushed by the Persians at the time they overran the Greek peninsula.

2. Do periods of great political, commercial, and intellectual expansion usually subject old systems of morality and education to severe strain?

Illustrate.

3. Why was the change in the type of Athenian education during the Ephebic years a natural and even a necessary one for the new Athens?

4. Do you understand that the system of training before the Ephebic years was also seriously changed, or was the change largely a reshaping and extension of the education of youths after sixteen?

5. Were the Sophists a good addition to the Athenian instructing force, or not? Why?

6. How may a State establish a corrective for such a flood of individualism as overwhelmed Greece, and still allow individual educational initiative and progress?

7. Do we as a nation face danger from the flood of individualism we have encouraged in the past? How is our problem like and unlike that of Athens after the Peloponnesian War?

8. What is the place in Greek life and thought of the ideal treatises on education written by Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle, after the flood of individualism had set in?

9. In what ways was the conquest of Alexander good for world civilization?

10. Of what importance is it, in the history of our western civilization, that Greek thought had so thoroughly permeated the eastern Mediterranean world before Roman armies conquered the region?

11. Picture for yourself the great intellectual advances of the Greeks by contrasting the tribal preparedness-type of education of the early Greek States and the learning possessed by the scholars of the University at Alexandria.

12. Compare the spread of Greek language and knowledge throughout the eastern Mediterranean world, following the conquests of Alexander, with the spread of the English language and ideas as to government throughout the modern world.

SELECTED READINGS

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

7. Wilkins: Athens in the Time of Pericles.

8. Isocrates: The Instruction of the Sophists.

9. Xenophon: An Example of Socratic Teaching.

10. Draper: The Schools of Alexandria.

11. Butcher: What we Owe to Greece.

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS

1. Characterize the many educational influences of Athens, as pictured by Wilkins (7).

2. Were the evils of the Sophist teachers, which Isocrates points out (8), natural ones? Compare with teachers of vocal training to-day.

3. What would be necessary for the proper training of one for eloquence?

Could any Sophist teacher have trained anyone?

4. Would it be possible to-day for any one city to become such a center of the world’s intellectual life as did Alexandria (10)? Why?

5. Could the Socratic method (9) be applied to instruction in psychology, ethics, history, and science equally well? Why? To what class of subjects is the Socratic quiz applicable?

6. How do you account for the fact that the wonderful promise of Alexandrian science was not fulfilled?

7. State our debt to the Greeks (11).

SUPPLEMENTAL REFERENCES

The most important references are indicated by an *

* Bevan, J. O. University Life in Olden Time.

* Butcher, S. H. Some Aspects of the Greek Genius.

* Davidson, Thos. Aristotle, and Ancient Educational Ideals.

* Freeman, K. J. Schools of Hellas.

Gulick, C. B. The Life of the Ancient Greeks.

* Kingsley, Chas. Alexandria and her Schools.

Laurie, S. S. Historical Survey of Pre-Christian Education.

* Mahaffy, J. P. Old Greek Education.

Sandys, J. E. History of Classical Scholarship, vol. I.

Walden, John W. H. The Universities of Ancient Greece.

Wilkins, A. S. National Education in Greece in the Fourth Century, B.C.