Since about 1850 an entirely new estimate has come to be placed on the importance of national attention to child welfare, though the beginnings of the change date back much earlier. As we have seen (p. 325), England early began to care for the children of its poor. In the Poor-Relief and Apprenticeship Law of 1601 (R. 174) England organized into law the growing practice of a century (p. 326) and laid the basis for much future work of importance. In this legislation, as we have seen, the foundations of the Massachusetts school law of 1642 were laid. In the Virginia laws of 1643 and 1646 (R. 200 a) and the Massachusetts law of 1660, providing for the apprenticeship of orphans and homeless children, the beginnings of child- welfare work in the American Colonies were made.
Many of the Catholic religious orders in Europe had for long cared for and brought up poor and neglected children, and in 1729 the first private orphanage in the new world was established by the Ursulines (p. 346) in New Orleans. The first public orphanage in America was established in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1790; the first in England at Birmingham, in 1817, and in 1824 the New York House of Refuge was founded. The latter was the forerunner of the juvenile reformatory institutions established later by practically all of the American States. These have developed chiefly since 1850. To-day most of the American States and governments in many other lands also provide state homes for orphan and neglected children, where they are clothed, fed, cared for, educated, and trained for some useful employment.
CHILD-LABOR LEGISLATION. One of the best evidences of the new nineteenth- century humanitarianism is to be found in the large amount of child-labor legislation which arose, largely after 1850, and which has been particularly prominent since 1900.
Under the earlier agricultural conditions and the restricted demand for education for ordinary life needs, child labor was not especially harmful, as most of it was out of doors and under reasonably good health conditions. With the coming of the factory system, the rise of cities and the city congestion of population, and other evils connected with the Industrial Revolution, the whole situation was changed. Humanitarians now began to demand legislation to restrict the evils that had arisen. This demand arose earliest in England, and resulted in the earliest legislation there.
The year 1802 is important in the history of child-welfare work for the enactment, by the English Parliament, of the first law to regulate the employment of children in factories. This was known as the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act (R. 373). This Act, though largely ineffectual at the time, ordered important reforms which aroused public opinion and which later bore important fruit. By it the employment of work-house orphans was limited; it forbade the labor of children under twelve, for more than twelve hours a day; provided that night labor of children should be discontinued, after 1804; ordered that the children so employed must be taught reading and writing and ciphering, be instructed in religion one hour a week, be taken to church every Sunday, and be given one new suit of clothes a year; ordered separate sleeping apartments for the two sexes, and not over two children to a bed; and provided for the registration and inspection of factories. This law represents the beginnings of modern child-labor legislation. It was 1843 before any further child-labor legislation of importance was enacted, and 1878 before a comprehensive child-labor bill was finally passed. In the United States the first laws regulating the employment of children and providing for their school attendance were enacted by Rhode Island in 1840, and Massachusetts in 1842. Factory legislation in other countries has been a product of more recent forces and times.
To-day important child-labor legislation has been enacted by all progressive nations, and the leading world nations have taken advanced ground on the question. All recent thinking is opposed to children engaging in productive labor. With the rise of organized labor, and the extension of the suffrage to the laboring man, he has joined the humanitarians in opposition to his children being permitted to labor. From an economic point of view also, all recent studies have shown the unprofitableness of child labor and the large money-value, under present industrial conditions, of a good education. As a result of much agitation and the spread of popular education, it has at last come to be a generally accepted principle (R. 374) that it is better for children and better for society that they should remain in school until they are at least fourteen years of age, and be specially trained for some useful type of work. Shown to be economically unprofitable, and for long morally indefensible, child labor is now rapidly being superseded by suitable education and the vocational training and guidance of youth in all progressive nations.
COMPULSORY SCHOOL-ATTENDANCE LEGISLATION. The natural corollary of the taxation of the wealth of the State to educate the children of the State, and the prohibition of children to labor, is the compulsion of children to attend school that they may receive the instruction and training which the State has deemed it wise to tax its citizens to provide.
Except in the German States, compulsory education is a relatively recent idea, though in its origins it is a child of the Protestant Reformation theory as to education for salvation. Luther and his followers had stood for the education of all, supported by (R. 156) and enforced by (R. 158) the State. This idea of the education of all to read the Bible took deep root, as we have seen, with both Lutherans and Calvinists. In 1619 the little Duchy of Weimar made the school attendance of all children, six to twelve years of age, compulsory, and the same idea was instituted in Gotha by Duke Ernest (p. 317), in 1642; the same year that the Massachusetts General Court ordered the Selectmen of the towns to ascertain if parents and the masters of apprentices (R. 190) were training their children "in learning and labor" and "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country." This latter law is remarkable in that, for the first time in the English-speaking world, a legislative body representing the State ordered that all children should be taught to read. Five years later (1647) the Massachusetts Court ordered the establishment of schools (R. 191) better to enforce the compulsion, and thus laid the foundations upon which the American public-school systems have since been built. In Holland, the Synod of Dort (1618) had tried to institute the idea of compulsory education (R. 176), and in 1646 the Scotch Parliament had ordered the compulsory establishment of schools (R. 179).
In German lands the compulsory-attendance idea took deep root, and in consequence the Germans were the first important modern nation to enforce, thoroughly, the education of all. In 1717 King Frederick William I issued (p. 555) the first compulsory-education law for Prussia, ordering that "hereafter wherever there are schools in the place the parents shall be obliged, under severe penalties, to send their children to school,… daily in winter, but in summer at least twice a week." He further ordered that the fees for the poor were to be paid "from the community's funds." Finally Frederick the Great organized the earlier procedure into comprehensive codes, and made (1763, R. 274, Section 10; 1765, R. 275 d) detailed provisions relating to the compulsion to attend the schools. In the Code of 1794 (p. 565) the final legislative step was taken when it was ordered that "the instruction in school must be continued until the child is found to possess the knowledge necessary to every rational being." By the middle of the eighteenth century the basis was clearly laid in Prussia for that enforcement of the compulsion to attend schools which, by the middle of the nineteenth century, had become such a notable characteristic of all German education. The same compulsory idea early took deep root among the Scandinavian peoples. In consequence the lowest illiteracy in Europe, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was to be found (see map, p. 714) among the Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Germans.
The compulsory-attendance idea died out in America, in the Netherlands, and in part in Scotland. In England and in the Anglican Colonies in America it never took root. In France the idea awaited the work of the National Convention, which (1792) ordered three years of education compulsory for all. War and the lack of interest of Napoleon in primary education caused the requirement, however, to become a dead letter. The Law of 1833 provided for but did not enforce it, and real compulsory education in France did not come until 1882. In England the compulsory idea received but little attention until after 1870, met with much opposition, and only recently have comprehensive reforms been provided. In the United States the new beginnings of compulsory-attendance legislation date from the Rhode Island child-labor law of 1840, and the first modern compulsory-attendance law enacted by Massachusetts, in 1852. By 1885, fourteen American States and six Territories had enacted some form of compulsory-attendance law. Since 1900 there has been a general revision of American state legislation on the subject, with a view to increasing and the better enforcement of the compulsory-attendance requirements, and with a general demand that the National Congress should enact a national child- labor law.
As a result of this legislation the labor of young children has been greatly restricted; work in many industries has been prohibited entirely, because of the danger to life and health; compulsory education has been extended in a majority of the American States to cover the full school year; poverty, or dependent parents, in many States no longer serves as an excuse for non-attendance; often those having physical or mental defects also are included in the compulsion to attend, if their wants can be provided for; the school census has been changed so as to aid in the location of children of compulsory school-attendance age; and special officers have been authorized or ordered appointed to assist school authorities in enforcing the compulsory-attendance and child-labor laws. Having taxed their citizens to provide schools, the different States now require children to attend and partake of the advantages provided. The schools, too, have made a close study of retarded pupils, because of the close connection found to exist between retardation in school and truancy and juvenile delinquency.
ONE RESULT OF THIS LEGISLATION. One of the results of all this legislation has been to throw, during the past quarter of a century, an entirely new burden on schools everywhere. Such legislation has brought into the schools not only the truant and the incorrigible, who under former conditions either left early or were expelled, but also many children who have no aptitude for book learning, and many of inferior mental qualities who do not profit by ordinary classroom procedure. Still more, they have brought into the school the crippled, tubercular, deaf, epileptic, and blind, as well as the sick, needy, and physically unfit. By steadily raising the age at which children may leave school, from ten or twelve up to fourteen and sixteen, schools everywhere have come to contain many children who, having no natural aptitude for study, would at once, unless specially handled, become a nuisance in the school and tend to demoralize schoolroom procedure. These laws have thrown upon the school a new burden in the form of public expectancy for results, whereas a compulsory- education law cannot create capacity to profit from education. Under the earlier educational conditions the school, unable to handle or educate such children, dealt with them much as the Church of the time dealt with religious delinquents. It simply expelled them or let them drop from school, and no longer concerned itself about them. To-day the public expects the school to retain and get results with them. Consequently, within the past twenty-five years the whole attitude of the school toward such children has undergone a change; many different kinds of classes and courses, that might serve better to handle them, have been introduced; and an attempt has been made to salvage them and turn back to society as many of them as possible, trained for some form of social and personal usefulness.
THE EDUCATION OF DEFECTIVES. Another nineteenth-century expansion of state education has come in the provision now generally made for the education of defectives. To-day the state school systems of Christian nations generally make some provision for state institutional care, and often for local classes as well, for the training of children who belong to the seriously defective classes of society. This work is almost entirely a product of the new humanitarianism of modern times. Excepting the education of the deaf, seriously begun a little earlier, all effective work dates from the first half of the nineteenth century. At first the feasibility of all such instruction was doubted, and the work generally was commenced privately. Out of successes thus achieved, public institutions have been built up to carry on, on a large scale, what was begun privately on a small scale. It is now felt to be better for the State, as well as for the unfortunates themselves, that they be cared for and educated, as suitably and well as possible, for self-respect, self- support, and some form of social and vocational usefulness. In consequence, the compulsory-attendance laws of the leading world States to-day require that defectives, between certain ages at least, be sent to a state institution or be enrolled in a public-school class specialized for their training.
[Illustration: FIG. 235. ABBÉ DE L'ÉPÉE (1712-89)]
BEGINNINGS OF THE WORK. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century a number of private efforts at the education of the deaf are on record, all dating however from the pioneer work of a Spanish Benedictine, in 1578. In 1760 a new era in the education of the deaf was begun when Abbé de l'Épée opened a school at Paris for the oral instruction of poor deaf mutes, and Thomas Braidwood (1715-1806) began similar work at Edinburgh. A few years later (1778) a third school was opened at Leipzig. This last was established under the patronage of the Elector of Saxony, and was the first school of its kind in the world to receive government recognition. The Paris school was taken over as a state institution by the Constituent Assembly, in 1791. In England the instruction of the deaf remained a private and a family monopoly until 1819. In 1817 the first school in America was opened, at Hartford, Connecticut, by the Reverend Thomas H. Gallaudet, and Massachusetts, in 1819, sent the first pupils paid for at state expense to this institution. In 1823 Kentucky created the first state school for the training of the deaf established in the new world, and Ohio the second, in 1827.
[Illustration: FIG. 236. REV. THOMAS H. GALLAUDET TEACHING THE DEAF ANDDUMBFrom a bas-relief on the monument of Gallaudet, erected by the deaf anddumb of the United States, in the grounds of the American Asylum, atHartford, Connecticut.]
The education of the blind began in France, in 1784; England, in 1791; Austria, in 1804; Prussia, in 1806; Holland, in 1808; Sweden, in 1810; Denmark, in 1811; Scotland, in 1812; in Boston and New York, in 1832; and in Philadelphia, in 1833. All were private institutions, and general interest in the education of the blind was awakened later by exhibiting the pupils trained. The first book for the blind was printed in Paris, in 1786. The first kindergarten for the blind was established in Germany, in 1861; the first school for the colored blind, by North Carolina, in 1869.
[Illustration: FIG. 237. EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS MAINTAINED BY THE STATEAs state institutions, other than public schools.]
Before the nineteenth century the feeble-minded and idiotic were the laughing-stock of society, and no one thought of being able to do anything for them. In 1811 Napoleon ordered a census of such individuals, and in 1816 the first school for their training was opened at Salzburg, Austria. The school was unsuccessful, and closed in 1835. The real beginning of the training of the feeble-minded was made in France, by Edouard Séguin, "The Apostle of the Idiot," in 1837, when he began a life-long study of such defectives. By 1845 three or four institutions had been opened in Switzerland and Great Britain for their study and training, and for a time an attempt was made to effect cures. Gallaudet had tried to educate such children at Hartford, about 1820, and a class for idiots was established at the Blind Asylum in Boston, in 1848. The interest thus aroused led to the creation of the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth, in 1851, the first institution of its kind in the United States. In 1867 the first city school class to train children of low-grade intelligence was organized in Germany, and all the larger cities of Germany later organized such special classes. Norway followed with a similar city organization, in 1874; and England, Switzerland, and Austria, about 1892. The first American city to organize such classes was Providence, Rhode Island, in 1893. Since that time special classes for children of low-grade mentality have become a common feature of the large city school systems in most American cities.
In 1832 the first attempt to educate crippled children, as such, was made in Munich. The model school in Europe for the education of cripples was established in Copenhagen, in 1872. The work was begun privately in New York City, in 1861, and first publicly in Chicago, in 1899. The London School Board first began such classes in England, in 1898.
Dependents, orphans, children of soldiers and sailors, and incorrigibles of various classes represent others for whom modern States have now provided special state institutions. To-day a modern State finds it necessary to provide a number of such specialized institutions, or to make arrangements with neighboring States for the care of its dependents, if it is to meet what have come to be recognized as its humanitarian educational duties. The more important of these special state institutions are shown in the diagram given in Fig. 237.
Public playgrounds and play directors, vacation schools, juvenile courts, disciplinary classes, parental schools, classes for mothers, visiting home-teachers and nurses, and child-welfare societies and officers, are other means for caring for child life and child welfare which have all been begun within the past half-century. The significance of these additions lies chiefly in that the history of the attitude of nations toward their child life is the history of the rise of humanitarianism, altruism, justice, order, morality, and civilization itself.
THE EDUCATION OF SUPERIOR CHILDREN. All the work described above and relating to the work of defectives, delinquents, and children for some reason in need of special attention and care has been for those who represent the less capable and on the whole less useful members of society—the ones from whom society may expect the least. They are at the same time the most costly wards of the State.
Wholly within the second decade of the present century, and largely as a result of the work of the French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857-1911) we are now able to sort out, for special attention, a new class of what are known as superior, or gifted children, and to the education of these special attention is to-day here and there beginning to be directed. Educationally, it is an attempt to do for democratic forms of national organization what a two-class school system does for monarchical forms, but to select intellectual capacity from the whole mass of the people, rather than from a selected class or caste. We know now that the number of children of superior ability is approximately as large as the number of the feeble in mind, and also that the future of democratic governments hinges largely upon the proper education and utilization of these superior children. One child of superior intellectual capacity, educated so as to utilize his talents, may confer greater benefits upon mankind, and be educationally far more important, than a thousand of the feeble-minded children upon whom we have recently come to put so much educational effort and expense. Questions relating to the training of leaders for democracy's service attain new significance in terms of the recent ability to measure and grade intelligence, as also do questions relating to grading, classification in school, choice of studies, rate of advancement, and the vocational guidance of children in school.
Net Average Worth of a PersonAgeWorth0 $905 95010 200020 400030 410040 365050 290060 165070 1580 -700(Calculations by Dr. William Farr, formerly Registrar of VitalStatistics for Great Britain. Based on pre-war values.)
THE NEW INTEREST IN HEALTH. Another new expansion of the educational service which has come in since the middle of the nineteenth century, and which has recently grown to be one of large significance, is work in the medical inspection of schools, the supervision of the health of pupils, and the new instruction in preventive hygiene. This is a product of the scientific and social and industrial revolutions which the nineteenth century brought, rather than of humanitarian influences, and represents an application of newly discovered scientific knowledge to health work among children. Its basis is economic, though its results are largely physical and educational and social (R. 375).
The discovery and isolation of bacteria; the vast amount of new knowledge which has come to us as to the transmission and possibilities for the elimination of many diseases; the spread of information as to sanitary science and preventive medicine; the change in emphasis in medical practice, from curative to preventive and remedial; the closer crowding together of all classes of people in cities; the change of habits for many from life in the open to life in the factory, shop, and apartment; and the growing realization of the economic value to the nation of its manhood and womanhood; have all alike combined with modern humanitarianism and applied Christianity to make progressive nations take a new interest in child health and proper child development. European nations have so far done much more in school health work than has the United States, though a very commendable beginning has been made here.
MEDICAL INSPECTION AND HEALTH SUPERVISION. Medical inspection of schools began in France, in 1837, though genuine medical inspection, in a modern sense, was not begun in France until 1879. The pioneer country for real work was Sweden, where health officers were assigned to each large school as early as 1868. Norway made such appointments optional in 1885, and obligatory in 1891. Belgium began the work in 1874. Tests of eyesight were begun in Dresden in 1867. Frankfort-on-Main appointed the first German school physician in 1888. England first employed school nurses in 1887; and, in 1907, following the revelations as to low physical vitality growing out of the Boer War, adopted a mandatory medical-inspection and health-development act applying to England and Wales, and the year following Scotland did the same. Argentine and Chili both instituted such service in 1888, and Japan made medical inspection compulsory and universal in 1898.
In the United States the work was begun voluntarily in Boston, in 1894, following a series of epidemics. Chicago organized medical inspection in 1895, New York City in 1897, and Philadelphia in 1898. From these larger cities the idea spread to the smaller ones, at first slowly, and then very rapidly. The first school nurse in the United States was employed in New York City, in 1902, and the idea at once proved to be of great value. In 1906 Massachusetts adopted the first state medical inspection law. In 1912 Minnesota organized the first "State Division of Health Supervision of Schools" in the United States, and this plan has since been followed by other States.
From mere medical inspection to detect contagious diseases, in which the movement everywhere began, it was next extended to tests for eyesight and hearing, to be made by teachers or physicians, and has since been enlarged to include physical examinations to detect hidden diseases and a constructive health-program for the schools. The work has now come to include eye, ear, nose, throat, and teeth, as well as general physical examinations; the supervision of the teaching of hygiene in the schools, and to a certain extent the physical training and playground activities; and a constructive program for the development of the health and physical welfare of all children. All this represents a further extension of the public-education idea.
An important recent development in the field of public education, and in a sense an outgrowth of all the preceding recent development which we have described, has been the organization of collegiate and university instruction in the history, theory, practice, and administration of education. Still more recent has been the organization of Teachers' Colleges and Schools of Education to give advanced training in educational research and in the solution of the practical problems of school organization and administration. So important has this recent development become that no history of educational progress would be complete without at least a brief mention of this recent attempt to give scientific organization to the educational process.
EARLY BEGINNERS. Though the teachers' seminaries had been organized in Germany and other northern lands toward the close of the eighteenth century, the normal school in France early in the nineteenth, and the training-college in England and the normal school in the United States by the close of the first third of that century, the work in these remained for a long time almost entirely academic in nature and elementary in character. This was also true of the superior normal school for training teachers for thelycéesof France.
The reason for this is easy to find. The writings of the earlier educational reformers were little known; the contributions of Herbart and Froebel had not as yet been popularized; there was no organized psychology of the educational process, and no psychology better than that of John Locke; the detailed Pestalozzian procedure had not as yet been worked out in the form of teaching technique; the history of the development of educational theory or of educational practice had not been written; and almost no philosophy of the educational purpose had been formulated which could be used in the training-schools. In consequence the training of teachers, both for elementary and secondary instruction, [22] was almost entirely in academic subjects, with some talks on school-keeping and class organization and management added, and at times a little philosophy as to educational work, such as habit-formation, morality, thinking, and the training of the will. Educational journalism did not begin in either Europe or America until near the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and it was 1850 before it attained any significance, and 1840 to 1850 before any important pedagogical literature arose. [23]
[Illustration: FIG. 238. KARL GEORG VON RAUMER (1783-1865)]
NEW INFLUENCE. In 1843 there appeared, in Germany, the first two volumes of a very celebrated and influential History of Education, by a professor of mineralogy in the University of Erlangen, by the name of Karl Gcorg von Raumer. As a young man in Paris (1808-09), studying the great mineral collections found there, he read and was deeply stirred by Fichte's "Address to the German Nation" (p. 567). As a result he went to Yverdon, in 1809, and spent some months in studying the work in Pestalozzi's Institute. This interest in education he never lost, and thereafter, as professor of mineralogy at Halle and Erlangen, he also gave lectures on pedagogy (Uber Pädagogik). The outgrowth of these lectures was his four- volumeHistory of Pedagogy from the Revival of Classical Studies to our own Time. [24] The work was done with characteristic German thoroughness, and for long served as a standard organization and text on the history of the development of educational theory and practice since the days of the Revival of Learning. The work of von Raumer stimulated many to a study of the writings of the earlier educational reformers, and numerous books and papers on educational history and theory soon began to appear. Most important, for American students, was Henry Barnard's monumentalAmerican Journal of Education, begun in 1855, and continued for thirty-one years. This is a great treasure-house of pedagogical literature for American educators.
After 1850 the organization of a technique of instruction for the elementary-school subjects took place rapidly, in the normal schools of all lands, as it had earlier in the German teachers' seminaries. By 1868 the study of the new Herbartian psychology and educational theory was well under way in Germany, and by 1890 in the United States. By 1875 the kindergarten, with its new theory of child life, was also beginning to make itself felt in both Europe and America. Between 1850 and 1875 Weber, Lotze, Fechner, and Wundt laid the foundations for a new psychology (R. 357), and in 1878 Wundt opened the first laboratory for the experimental study of psychology at the University of Leipzig. In 1890 William James published his two-volume work onPrinciples of Psychology, a book so original and lucid in treatment that it at once gave a new teaching organization to modern psychology. After about 1880, the extension of education upward and outward in the United States, and the rapid development of state school systems which had by that time begun, began to make new demands for better scientific and legal and administrative organization, and this gave rise to a new type of educational literature.
After von Raumer's work, probably the greatest single stimulative influence of the mid-nineteenth century was that exerted by the marked successes of the Prussian armies in a series of short but very decisive wars. Against Denmark (1864) and Austria (1866), but in particular in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the Prussian armies proved irresistible. These military operations attracted new attention to education, and "the Prussian schoolmaster has triumphed" became a common world saying. This, coupled with the remarkable national development of United Germany which almost immediately set in, caused progressive nations to turn to the study of education with increased interest. The English and Scottish universities now began to establish lectureships in the theory and history of education, [25] and the first university chairs in education in the United States were founded.
THE UNIVERSITY STUDY OF EDUCATION. In no country in the world have the universities, within the past three decades, given the attention to the study of Education—a term that in English-speaking lands has replaced the earlier and more limited "Pedagogy"—that has been given in the United States. [26] After the United States the newer universities of England probably come next. Up to 1890 less than a dozen chairs of education had been established in all the colleges of the United States, and their work was still largely limited to historical and philosophical studies of education, and to a type of classroom methodology and school management, since almost entirely passed over to the normal schools. By 1920 there were some four hundred colleges in the United States giving serious courses on educational history and procedure and administration, many of them maintaining large and important professional Schools of Education for the more scientific study of the subject, and for the training of leaders for the service of the nation's schools.
In the great advances which have taken place in the organization of education, during these three decades, no institution in the world has exerted a more important influence than has "Teachers College," Columbia University, in the City of New York, which was organized in 1887 as "The New York College for the Training of Teachers," but since 1890 has been affiliated with Columbia University, under its present name. This institution has been a model copied by many others over the world; has trained a large percentage of the leaders in education in the United States; and has been particularly influential with students from England, the English self-governing dominions, China, and South America.
To-day, in all the state universities and in many non-state institutions in the United States, we find well-organized Teachers' Colleges engaged in a work which two decades ago was being attempted by but a few institutions anywhere, In the municipal universities of England, in Canada, in Japan and China, and in other democratic lands, we find the beginnings of a similar development of the scientific study of education. In these Schools or Colleges for the scientific study of education the best thinking on the problems of the reorganization and administration of education, and the most new and creative work, has been and is being done. [27]
THE PROBLEMS OF THE PRESENT. Pestalozzi dreamed that he might be able to psychologize instruction and reduce all to an orderly procedure, which, once learned, would make one a master teacher. What he was not able to accomplish he died thinking others after him would do. The problem of education has had, with time, no such simple and easy solution. Instead, with the development of state school systems, the extension of education in many new directions to meet new needs, and the application to the study of education of the same scientific methods which have produced such results in other fields of human knowledge, we have come to-day to have hundreds of problems, many of which are complex and difficult and which influence deeply the welfare of society and the State. That these problems, even with time, will receive any such simple solution as that of which Pestalozzi dreamed, may well be doubted. In the days of church control, memoriter instruction, and a school for religious ends, education was a simple matter; to-day it partakes of the difficulty and complexity which characterize most of the problems of modern world States. In consequence of this important change in the character of education a great number of important problems in educational organization, practice, and procedure now face us for solution.
Space can here be taken to mention only the more prominent of these present-day educational problems. On the administrative side is a whole group of problems relating to forms of organization: the proper educational relationships between the State and its subordinate units; the development of a state educational policy: the types of instruction the State must provide, and compel attendance upon; questions of taxation and support, compulsory attendance, and child labor; the training and oversight of teachers for the service of the State; problems of child health and welfare; the provision of adequate and professional supervision; the provision of continuation schools, and of industrial and vocational training; the supervision of school buildings for health and sanitary control; and the relation of the State to private and parochial education. The problem of how to produce as effective and as thorough education for leadership with a one-class school system as with a two- class; the opening-up of opportunity for youth of brains in any social class to rise and be trained for service; the selection and proper training of those of superior intelligence; the elimination of barriers to the advancement of children of large intellectual endowment; and what best to do with those of small intellectual capacity, form another important group of present-day educational problems. Vocational training and technical education, and the relation and the proper solution of these questions to national happiness and prosperity and human welfare, form still another important group. The many questions which hinge upon instruction; the elimination of useless subject-matter; the best organization of instruction; proper aims and ends; moral and civic training; the most economical organization of school work; the saving of time; and what are desirable educational reorganizations, all these form a group of instructional problems of large significance for the future of public education. Still more in detail, but of large importance, are the questions relating to the scientific measurement of the results of instruction; the erection of attainable goals in teaching; and the introduction of scientific accuracy into educational work. Still another important group of problems relates to the readjustment of inherited school organization and practices, the better to meet the changed and changing conditions of national life—social, industrial, political, religious, economic, scientific—brought about by the industrial and social and scientific and political revolutions which have taken place.
These represent some of the more important new problems in education which have come to challenge us since the school was taken over from the Church and transformed into the great constructive tool of the State. Their solution will call for careful investigation, experimentation, and much clear thinking, and before they are solved other new problems will arise. So probably it will ever be under a democratic form of government; only in autocratic or strongly monarchical forms of government, where the study of problems of educational organization and adjustment are not looked upon with favor, can a school system to-day remain for long fixed in type or uniform in character. Education to-day has become intricate and difficult, requiring careful professional training on the part of those who would exercise intelligent control, and so intimately connected with national strength and national welfare that it may be truthfully said to have become, in many respects, the most important constructive undertaking of a modern State.
1. Show that education must be extended and increased in efficiency in proportion as the suffrage is extended, and additional political functions given to the electorate. Illustrate.
2. Trace the changes in the character of the instruction given in the schools, paralleling such changes.
3. Explain the difference in use of the schools for nationality ends in Germany and France.
4. Of what is the recent development of evening, adult, and extension education an index?
5. Show why university education is more important in national life to-day than ever before in history.
6. Compare the rate of development of universities during the nineteenth century, and all time before the nineteenth. Of what is the difference in rate an index?
7. Explain why Americans have been less successful in introducing science instruction into their schools than have the Germans. Agriculture than the French.
8. Explain the breakdown of the old apprenticeship education.
9. Explain the American recent rapid acceptance of the agricultural high school, whereas the agricultural colleges for a long time faced opposition and lack of interest and support.
10. Explain the continued emphasis of high-school studies leading to the professions rather than the vocations, though so small a percentage of people are needed for professional work.
11. In Germany this was largely regulated by the Government; show how it would be much easier there than in the United States.
12. Show why European nations would naturally take up vocational training ahead of the United States, Canada, Australia, or South America.
13. Explain the reasons for the new conceptions as to the value of child life which have come within the past hundred years, in all advanced nations. Why not in the less advanced nations?
14. Show the relation between the breakdown of the apprentice system, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of compulsory school attendance.
15. Show that compulsory school attendance is a natural corollary to general taxation for education.
16. How do you account for the relatively recent interest in the education of defectives and delinquents? Of what is this interest an expression?
17. Does the obligation assumed to educate involve any greater exercise of state authority or recognition of duty than the advancement of the health of the people and the sanitary welfare of the State?
18. What additional unsolved problems would you add to the list given on the preceding page?
In the accompanyingBook of Readingsthe following selections illustrative of the contents of this chapter are reproduced:
367. McKechnie, W. S.: The Environmental Influence of the State.368. Emperor William II.: German Secondary Schools and National Ends.369. Van Hise, Chas. R.: The University and the State.370. Friend: What the Folk High Schools have done for Denmark.371. U.S. Commission: The German System of Vocational Education.372. U.S. Commission: Vocational Education and National Prosperity.373. de Montmorency: English Conditions before the First Factory-LaborAct.374. Giddings, F. R.: The New Problem of Child Labor.375. Hoag, E. B., and Terman, L. M.: Health Work in the Schools.
1. Explain why it is now so important that the State properly environ (367) its youth.
2. What were the actuating motives behind the German Emperor's speech (368)? Was he right in his position as to the relation of the schools and national needs and welfare?
3. Explain Van Hise's conception (369) that the university is "The Soul of the State."
4. Does Denmark form any exception as to what might be done (370) in any country, such as Russia? Mexico?
5. Show that the results justified the German emphasis (371) on vocational training. How do you explain this German far-sightedness?
6. What will be the result when many nations (372) become highly skilled?
7. Show the growth of humanitarian influences by contrasting conditions in England in 1802 (373), and conditions to-day.
8. Would the English 1802 conditions be found in any Christian land today? Why?
9. Show that the child-labor problem (374) is a product of the Industrial Revolution.
10. Viewed in the light of history, what would we say of the present opposition to health work (375) in the schools?
* Allen, E. A. "Education of Defectives"; in Butler, N. M.,Educationin the United States, pp. 771-820.Barnard, Henry.National Education in Europe.*Commission on National Aid to Vocational Education, Report, vol.I. (Document 1004, H. R., 63d Congress, 2d session, Washington, 1914.)Cook, W. A. "A Brief Survey of the Development of Compulsory Educationin the United States"; inElementary School Teacher, vol. 12,PP. 33l-35 (March, 1912.)* Dean, A. D.The Worker and the State.Eliot, C. W.Education for Efficiency.Farrington, F. E.Commercial Education in Germany.Foght, H. W.Rural Denmark and its Schools.Friend, L. L.The Folk High Schools of Denmark. (Bulletin No. 3,1914, United States Bureau of Education.)* Hoag, E. B., and Terman, L. M.Health Work in the Schools.Kandel, I. L, "The Junior High School in European Systems"; inEducational Review, vol. 58, pp. 305-29. (Nov. 1919.)* Munroe, J. P.New Demands in Education.* Payne, G. H.The Child in Human Progress.Smith, A. T., and Jesien, W. S.Higher Technical Education in ForeignCountries. (Bulletin No. n, 1917, United States Bureau ofEducation.)Snedden, D. S.Vocational Education.* Terman, L. M.The Intelligence of School Children.Waddle, C. W.Introduction to Child Psychology, chap. I.Ware, Fabian.Educational Foundations of Trade and Industry.
We have now reached the end of the story of the rise and progress of man's conscious effort to improve himself and advance the welfare of his group by means of education. To one who has followed the narrative thus far it must be evident how fully this conscious effort has paralleled the history of the rise and progress of western civilization itself. Beginning first among the Greeks—the first people in history to be "smitten with the passion for truth." the first possessing sufficient courage to put faith in reason, and the first to attempt to reconcile the claims, of the State and the individual and to work out a plan of "ordered liberty"—a new spirit was born and in time passed on to the western world. As Butcher well says (R. 11), "the Greek genius is the European genius in its first and brightest bloom, and from a vivifying contact with the Greek spirit Europe derived that new and mighty impulse which we call Progress." Hellenizing first the Eastern Mediterranean, and then taking captive her rude conqueror, the Hellenization of the Roman and early Christian world was the result.
Then followed the reaction under early Christian rule, and the fearful deluge of barbarism which for centuries well-nigh extinguished both the ancient learning and the new spirit. Finally, after the long mediaeval night, came "time's burst of dawn," first and for a long time confined to Italy, but later extending to all northern lands, and in the century of revival and rediscovery and reconstruction the Greek passion for truth and the Greek courage to trust reason were reawakened, and once more made the heritage of the western world. Once again the Greek spirit, the spirit of freedom and progress and trust in the power of truth, became the impulse that was to guide and dominate the future. To follow reason without fear of consequences, to substitute scientific for empirical knowledge, to equip men for intelligent participation in civic life, to discover a rational basis for conduct, to unfold and expand every inborn faculty and energy, and to fill man with a restless striving after an ideal—these essentially Greek characteristics in time came to be accepted by an increasing number of modern men, as they had been by the thoughtful men of the ancient Greek world, as the law and goal of human endeavor. From this point on the intellectual progress of the western world was certain, though at times the rate seems painfully slow.
The great events which stand before, modern history—milestones, as it were, along the road to the intellectual progress of mankind in the recovery of the Greek spirit—were the revival of the ancient learning, the Protestant appeal to reason, the recovery and vast extension of the old scientific knowledge, the assertion of the rights of the individual as opposed to the rights of the State, and the growth of a new humanitarianism, induced by the teachings of Christianity, which has softened old laws and awakened a new conception of the value of child and human life. Out of these great historic movements have come modern scholarship, the inestimable boon of religious liberty, the firm establishment of the idea of the reign of law in an orderly universe, the conception of government as in the interests of the governed, the substitution of democracy and political equality for the rule of a class or an autocratic power, and the assertion of the right to an education at public expense as a birthright of every child. The common school, the education of all, equality of rights and opportunity, full and equal suffrage, the responsibility of all for the advancement of the common welfare, and liberty under law have been the natural consequences and the outcome of these great struggles to set free and quicken the human spirit.
The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which marked the close of a century of effort to crush human reason and religious liberty with violence and oppression, marked a turning-point in the history of the world. Though religious intolerance and bigotry might still persist in places for centuries to come, this Peace acknowledged the futility of persecution to stamp out human inquiry, and marked the downfall of intellectual medievalism. The work of the political philosophers of the eighteenth century, the establishment of a new political ideal by the leaders of the American Revolution, and the drastic sweeping-away of ancient abuses in Church and State in the Revolution in France, applied a new spirit to government, ushered in the rule of the common man, and began the establishment of democracy as the ruling form of government for mankind. The recent World War in Europe was in a sense a sequel to what had gone before. One result of its outcome, despite certain reactionary but temporary old-type governments that the near future may see set up in places, has been the elimination of the mediaeval theory of the "divine right of kings" from the continent of Europe, and the establishment of the democratic type of government as the ruling type of the future. Some of the nations for a time will be in a sense experimental, as shown on the above map, and even well-governed Germany must learn new forms and ways, but in time government of and by and for the people is practically certain to become established everywhere on the continent of Europe.
[Illustration: FIG. 239. THE ESTABLISHED AND EXPERIMENTAL NATIONS OFEUROPEThe established nations are in white; the experimental nations shaded.After a time Germany should become white also.]
Still more, the outcome of the World War would seem to indicate that democratic forms of government are destined in time to extend to peoples everywhere who have the capacity for using them. The great problem of the coming century, then, and perhaps even of succeeding centuries, will be to make democracy a safe form of government for the world. This can be done only by a far more general extension of educational opportunities and advantages than the world has as yet witnessed. In the hands of an uneducated proletariat democracy is a dangerous instrument. In Russia, Mexico, and in certain of the Central American Republics we see what a democracy results in in the hands of an uneducated people. There, too often, the revolver instead of the ballot box is used to settle public issues, and instead of orderly government under law we have a reign of injustice and anarchy. Only by the slow but sure means of general education of the masses in character and in the fundamental bases of liberty under law can governments that are safe and intelligent be created. In a far larger sense than anything we have as yet witnessed, education must become the constructive tool for national progress.
The great needs of the modern world call for the general diffusion among the masses of mankind of the intellectual and spiritual and political gains of the centuries, which are as yet, despite the great recent progress made in extending general education, the possession of but a relatively small number of the world's population. Among the more important of these are the religious spirit, coupled with full religious liberty and tolerance; a clear recognition of the rights of minorities, so long as they do not impair the advancement of the general welfare; the general diffusion of a knowledge of the more common truths and applications of science, particularly as these relate to personal hygiene, sanitation, agriculture, and modern industrial processes; the general education of all, not only in the tools of knowledge, but in those fundamental principles of self-government which lie at the basis of democratic life; training in character, self-control, and in the ability to assume and carry responsibility; the instilling into a constantly widening circle of mankind the importance of fidelity to duty, truth, honor, and virtue; the emphasis of the many duties and responsibilities which encompass all in the complex modern world, rather than the eighteenth-century individualistic conception of political and personal rights; the clear distinction between liberty and license; and the conception of liberty guided by law. In addition each man and woman should be educated for personal efficiency in some vocation or form of service in which each can best realize his personal possibilities, and at the same time render the largest service to that society of which he forms a part.
The great needs of the modern world also call for that form of education and training which will not merely impart literacy and prepare for economic competence and national citizenship, but which will give to national groups a new conception of national character and international morality and create new standards of value for human effort. National character and international morality are always the outgrowth of the personality of a people, and this in turn calls for the inculcation of humane ideals, the proper discipline of the instincts, the training of a will to do right, good physical vigor, and, to a large degree, the development of individual efficiency and economic competence. Moral and religious instruction, as it has been given, will not suffice, because it does not reach the heart of the problem. No nation has shown more completely the utter futility of religious instruction to produce morality than has Germany, where the instruction of all in the principles of religion has been required for centuries.
The problem of the twentieth century, then, and probably of other centuries to come, is how the constructive forces in modern society, of which the schools of nations should stand first, can best direct their efforts to influence and direct the deeper sources of the life of a people, so that the national characteristics it is desired to display to the world will be developed because the schools have instilled into every child these national ideals. Many forces must coöperate in such a task, but unless the schools of nations become clearly conscious of national needs and of international purposes, become inspired by an ideal of service for the welfare of mankind, substitute among national groups competition in the things of the spirit—art, architecture, music, sports, education, letters, sanitation, housing, public works, and such applications of science as minister to health and happiness—for competition in the creation of material wealth, the piling-up of armaments, the extension of national boundaries, and the present overemphasis of a narrow nationalism, and direct the energies of coming generations to the carrying-out of this new and larger human service, nations must inevitably fail to reach the world position they might otherwise have occupied, destructive international competition and warfare will continue, and the advancement of world civilization and international well-being will be greatly retarded thereby.
In this work of advancing world civilization, the nations which have long been in the forefront of progress must expect to assume important roles. It is their peculiar mission—for long clearly recognized by Great Britain and France in their political relations with inferior and backward peoples; by the United States in its excellent work in Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines; and clearly formulated in the system of "mandatories" under the League of Nations—to help backward peoples to advance, and to assist them in lifting themselves to a higher plane of world civilization. In doing this a very practical type of education must naturally play the leading part, and time, probably much time, will be required to achieve any large results. Disregarding the large need for such service among the leading world nations, the map reproduced on the opposite page reveals how much of such work still remains to be done in the world as a whole. "The White Man's Burden" truly is large, and the larger world tasks of the twentieth century for the more advanced nations will be to help other peoples, in distant and more backward lands, slowly to educate themselves in the difficult art of self-government, gradually establish stable and democratic governments of their own, and in time to take their places among the enlightened and responsible peoples of the earth.
[Illustration: FIG. 240. THE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS OF THE FUTURE Transition peoples are shaded; dependant and backward peoples black. The "mandatories" of the "League of Nations" will be in the black areas, and will have to be carried by the nations which have made the most progress in civilization and shown in the highest sense of responsibility for the welfare of peoples that have come under their care. The black areas reveal "The White Man's Burden" of the future.]
At the bottom of all this work and service lie the new human-liberty conceptions first worked out and formulated for the world by little Greece, In time the ideas to which they gave expression have become the heritage of what we know as our western civilization, and the warp and woof of the intellectual and political life of the modern world. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, and of the new political and commercial and social forces of our time, this western civilization, using education as its great constructive tool, is now spreading to every continent on the globe. The task of succeeding centuries will be to carry forward and extend what has been so well begun; to level up the peoples of the earth, as far as inherent differences in capacity will permit; and to extend, through educative influences, the principles and practices of a Christian civilization to all. In establishing intelligent and interested government, and in moulding and shaping the destinies of peoples, general education has become the great constructive tool of modern civilization. A hundred and fifty years ago education was of but little importance, being primarily an instrument of the Church and used for church ends. To-day general education is an instrument of government, and is rightfully regarded as a prime essential to good government and national progress. With the spread of the democratic type the importance of the school is enhanced, its control by the State becomes essential, its continued expansion to include new types of schools and new forms of educational opportunities and service a necessity, the study of its organization and administration and problems becomes a necessary function of government, while the training it can give is dignified and made the birthright of every boy and girl.
[1]Syllabus of Lectures on the History of Education, with Bibliographies, 1st ed., 302 pp., illustrated, New York, 1902; 2d ed., with classified bibliographies, 358 pp., illustrated. New York, 1905.
[1] The average size of an Illinois county is 550 square miles, or an area 22 x 25 miles square. The State of West Virginia contains 24,022 square miles, and Rhode Island 1067 square miles. Rhode Island would be approximately 30 x 36 miles square, which would make Attica approximately 20 x 36 miles square in area.
[2] The nearest analogy we have to the Greek City-States exists in the local town governments of the New England States, particularly Massachusetts, and the local county-unit governmental organizations of a number of the Southern States, though in each of these cases we have a state and a federal government above to unify and direct and control these small local governments, which did not exist, except temporarily, in Greece.
If an area the size of West Virginia were divided into some twenty independent counties, which could arrange treaties, make alliances, and declare war, and which sometimes united into leagues for defense or offense, but which were never able to unite to form a single State, we should have a condition analogous to that of mainland Greece. [3] A sea- faring people, the Greeks became to the ancient Mediterranean world what the English have been to the modern world. Southern Italy became so thickly set with small Greek cities that it was known asMagna Graecia. On the island of Sicily the city of Syracuse was founded (734 B.C.), and became a center of power and a home of noted Greeks. The city of Marseilles, in southern France, dates from an Ionic settlement about 600 B.C. The presence of another seafaring people, the Phoenicians, along the northern coast of Africa and southern and eastern Spain, probably checked the further spread of Greek colonies to the westward. The city of Cyrene, in northern Africa, dates from about 630 B.C. Greek colonists also went north and east, through the Dardanelles and on into the Black Sea. (See map, Figure 2.) Salonica and Constantinople date back to Greek colonization. Many of the colonies reflected great honor and credit on the motherland, and served to spread Greek manners, language, and religion over a wide area.
[4] It is the great mixed races that have counted for most in history. The strength of England is in part due to its wonderful mixture of peoples— Britons, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Northmen, to mention only the more important earlier peoples which have been welded together to form the English people.
[5] Athens, however, permitted the children of foreigners to attend its schools, particularly in the later period of Athenian education.
[6] "When I compare the customs of the Greeks with these (the Romans), I can find no reason to extol either those of the Spartans, or the Thebans, or even of the Athenians, who value themselves the most for their wisdom; all who, jealous of their nobility and communicating to none or to very few the privileges of their cities … were so far from receiving any advantage from this haughtiness that they became the greatest sufferers by it." (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in hisRoman Antiquitiesbook II, chap. XVII.)
[7] In Sparta the number of citizens was still less. At the time of the formulation of the Spartan constitution by Lycurgus (about 850 B.C.) there were but 9000 Spartan families in the midst of 250,000 subject people. This disproportion increased rather than diminished in later centuries.
[8] The Austrian-Magyar combination, which held together and dominated the many tribes of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, is an analogous modern situation, though on a much larger scale.
[9] Two Greek poems illustrate the Spartan mother, who was said to admonish her sons to come back with their shields, or upon them. The first is:
"Eight sons Daementa at Sparta's callSent forth to fight: one tomb received them all.No tears she shed, but shouted, 'Victory!Sparta, I bore them but to die for thee.'"
The second:
"A Spartan, his companion slain,Alone from battle fled:His mother, kindling with disdainThat she had borne him, struck him dead;For courage and not birth alone.In Sparta testifies a son."
"Go, tell at Sparta, thou that passest by,That here, obedient to her laws, we lie."(Epitaph on the three hundred who fell at Thermopylae.)
[10] An Athenian saying, of a man who was missing, was: "Either he is dead or has become a schoolmaster." To call a man a schoolmaster was to abuse him, according to Epicurus. Demosthenes, in his attack on Aeschines, ridicules him for the fact that his father was a schoolmaster in the lowest type of reading and writing school. "As a boy," he says, "you were reared in abject poverty, waiting with your father on the school, grinding the ink, sponging the benches, sweeping the room, and doing the duty of a menial rather than of a freeman's son." Lucian represents kings as being forced to maintain themselves in hell by teaching reading and writing.
[11] Women were not supposed to possess any of the privileges of citizenship, belonging rather to the alien class. They lived secluded lives, were not supposed to take any part in public affairs, and, if their husbands brought company to the house, they were expected to retire from view. In their attitude toward women the Greeks were an oriental rather than a modern or western people.
[12] "We learn first the names of the elements of speech, which are calledgrammata; then their shape and functions; then the syllables and their affections; lastly, the parts of speech, and the particular mutations connected with each, as inflection, number, contraction, accents, position in the sentence; then we begin to read and write, at first in syllables and slowly, but when we have attained the necessary certainty, easily and quickly." (Dionysius of Halicarnassus,De Compos. Verb, cap 25.)
[13] Fragments of a tile found in Attica have stamped upon them the syllablesar, bar, gar; er, ber, ger; etc. A bottle-shaped vase has also been found which, in addition to the alphabet, contains pronouncing exercises as follows:
bi-ba-bu-be zi-za-zu-ze pi-pa-pu-pe gi-ga-gu-ge mi-ma-mu-me etc.
[14] "Learning to read must have been a difficult business in Hellas, for books were written only in capitals at this time. There were no spaces between the words, and no stops were inserted. Thus the reader had to exercise his ingenuity before he could arrive at the meaning of a sentence." (Freeman, K. J.,Schools of Hellas, p. 87.)
[15] The Greeks had no numbers, but only words for numbers, and used the letters of the Greek alphabet with accents over them to indicate the words they knew as numbers. Counting and bookkeeping would of course be very difficult with such a system.
[16] "These poems, especially Homer, Hesiod, and Theognis, served at the same time for drill in language and for recitation, whereby on the one hand the memory was developed and the imagination strengthened, and on the other the heroic forms of antiquity and healthy primitive utterances regarding morality, and full of homely common sense, were deeply engraved on the young mind. Homer was regarded not merely as a poet, but as an inspired moral teacher, and great portions of his poems were learned by heart. The Iliad and the Odyssey were in truth the Bible of the Greeks." (Laurie, S. S.,Pre-Christian Education, p. 258.)
[17] Davidson, Thos.,Aristotle, pp. 73-75.
[18] Plutarch later expressed well the Greek conception of musical education in these words: "Whoever be he that shall give his mind to the study of music in his youth, if he meet with a musical education proper for the forming and regulating his inclinations, he will be sure to applaud and embrace that which is noble and generous, and to rebuke and blame the contrary, as well in other things as in what belongs to music. And by that means he will become clear from all reproachful actions, for now having reaped the noblest fruit of music, he may be of great use, not only to himself, but to the commonwealth; while music teaches him to abstain from everything that is indecent, both in word and deed, and to observe decorum, temperance, and regularity." (Monroe, Paul,History of Education, p. 92.)
[19] A flat circle of polished bronze, or other metal, eight or nine inches in diameter.
[20] "There were no home influences in Hellas. The men-folk lived out of doors. The young Athenian from his sixth year onward spent his whole day away from home, in the company of his contemporaries, at school or palaestra, or in the streets. When he came home there was no home life. His mother was a nonentity, living in the woman's apartments; he probably saw little of her. His real home was the palaestra, his companions his contemporaries and hispaidagogos. He learned to disassociate himself from his family and associate himself with his fellow citizens. No doubt he lost much by this system, but the solidarity of the State gained." (Freeman, K. J.,Schools of Hellas, p. 282.)
[21] "No doubt the Athenian public was by no means so learned as we moderns are; they were ignorant of many sciences, of much history,—in short of a thousand results of civilization which have since accrued. But in civilization itself, in mental power, in quickness of comprehension, in correctness of taste, in accuracy of judgment, no modern nation, however well instructed, has been able to equal by labored acquirements the inborn genius of the Greeks." (Mahaffy, J. P.,Old Greek Education.)
[22] The great institutions of the Greek City-State were in themselves highly educative. The chief of these were:
1. The Assembly, where the laws were proposed, debated, and made.2. The Juries, on which citizens sat and where the laws were applied.3. The Theater, where the great masterpieces of Greek literature wereperformed.4. The Olympian and other Games, which were great religious ceremoniesof a literary as well as an athletic and artistic character, and towhich Greeks from all over Hellas came.5. The city life itself, among an inquisitive, imaginative, anddisputatious people.
[1] The culmination came in what is known as the Age of Pericles, who was the master mind at Athens from 459 to 431 B.C. During the fifth century B.C. such names as Themistocles and Pericles in government, Phidias and Myron in art, Herodotus and Thucydides in historical narrative, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in tragic drama, and Aristophanes in comedy, graced Athens.
[2] With the Greeks, morality and the future life never had any connection.
[3] The early Greek philosophers tried to explain the physical world about them by trying to discover what they called the "first principle," from which all else had been derived. Thales (c. 624-548 B.C.), the father of Greek science, had concluded that water was the original source of all matter; Anaximenes (c. 588-524 B.C.), that air was the first principle; Heraclites (c. 525-475 B.C.), fire; and Pythagoras (c. 580-500 B.C.), number.
[4] "There was now demanded ability to discuss all sorts of social, political, economic, and scientific or metaphysical questions; to argue in public in the marketplace or in the law courts; to declaim in a formal manner on almost any topic; to amuse or even instruct the populace upon topics of interest or questions of the day; to take part in the many diplomatic embassies and political missions of the times—the ability, in fact, to shine in a democratic society much like our own and to control the votes and command the approval of an intelligent populace where the function of printing-press, telegraph, railroad, and all modern means of communication were performed through public speech and private discourse, and where the legal, ecclesiastical, and other professional classes of teachers did not exist." (Monroe, Paul,History of Education, pp. 109- 10.)
[5] The importance of a political career in the new Athens will be better understood if we remember that the influence on public opinion to-day exerted by the pulpit, bar, public platform, press, and scholar was then concentrated in the public speaker, and that the careers now open to promising youths in science, industry, commerce, politics, and government were then concentrated in the political career. It must also be remembered that the Greeks had always been a nation of speakers, both the content and the form of the address being important.
[6] Each of these philosophers proposed an ideal educational system designed to remedy the evils of the State. Xenophon (c.410-362 B.C.), in hisCyropaedia, purporting to describe the education of Cyrus of Persia, proposed a Spartan modification of the old Athenian system. Plato (429-348 B.C.), in hisRepublic, proposed an aristocratic socialism as a means of securing individual virtue and state justice. He first presents the super- civic man, an ideal destined for great usefulness among the Christians later on. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), in hisEthics, and in hisPolitics, outlined an ideal state and a system of education for it.
[7] "It is beyond all conception what that man espied, saw, beheld, remarked, observed." (Goethe.)
"One of the richest and most comprehensive geniuses that has ever appeared—a man beside whom no age has an equal to place." (Hegel.)