Читать книгу The History of Education - Ellwood Patterson Cubberley - Страница 13

The Civilization which we of to-day enjoy is a very complex thing, made up of many different contributions, some large and some small, from people in many different lands and different ages. To trace all these contributions back to their sources would be a task impossible of accomplishment, and, while specific parts would be interesting, for our purposes they would not be important. Especially would it not be profitable for us to attempt to trace the development of minor features, or to go back to the rudimentary civilizations of primitive peoples. The early development of civilization among the Chinese, the Hindoos, the Persians, the Egyptians, or the American Indians all alike present features which to some form a very interesting study, but our western civilization does not go back to these as sources, and consequently they need not concern us in the study we are about to begin. While we have obtained the alphabet from the Phoenicians and some of our mathematical and scientific developments through the medium of the Mohammedans, the real sources of our present-day civilization lie elsewhere, and these minor sources will be referred to but briefly and only as they influenced the course of western progress.

The civilization which we now know and enjoy has come down to us from four main sources. The Greeks, the Romans, and the Christians laid the foundations, and in the order named, and the study of the early history of our western civilization is a study of the work and the blending of these three main forces. It is upon these three foundation stones, superimposed upon one another, that our modern European and American civilization has been developed. The Germanic tribes, overrunning the boundaries of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, added another new force of largest future significance, and one which profoundly modified all subsequent progress and development. To these four main sources we have made many additions in modern times, building an entirely new superstructure on the old foundations, but the groundwork of our civilization is composed of these four foundation elements. For these reasons a history of even modern education almost of necessity goes back, briefly at least, to the work and contributions of these ancient peoples.

Starting, then, with the work of the Greeks, we shall state briefly the contributions to the stream of civilization which have come down to us from each of the important historic peoples or groups or forces, and shall trace the blending and assimilating processes of the centuries. While describing briefly the educational institutions and ideas of the different peoples, we shall be far less concerned, as we progress down the centuries, with the educational and philosophical theories advanced by thinkers among them than with what was actually done, and with the lasting contributions which they made to our educational practices and to our present-day civilization.

The work of Greece lies at the bottom and, in a sense, was the most important of all the earlier contributions to our education and civilization. These people, known as Hellenes, were the pioneers of western civilization. Their position in the ancient world is well shown on the map reproduced opposite. To the East lay the older political despotisms, with their caste-type and intellectually stagnant organization of society, and to the North and West a little-known region inhabited by barbarian tribes. It was in such a world that our western civilization had its birth. These Greeks, and especially the Athenian Greeks, represented an entirely new spirit in the world. In place of the repression of all individuality, and the stagnant conditions of society that had characterized the civilizations before them, they developed a civilization characterized by individual freedom and opportunity, and for the first time in world history a premium was placed on personal and political initiative. In time this new western spirit was challenged by the older eastern type of civilization. Long foreseeing the danger, and in fear of what might happen, the little Greek States had developed educational systems in part designed to prepare their citizens for what might come. Finally, in a series of memorable battles, the Greeks, led by Athens, broke the dread power of the Persian name and made the future of this new type of civilization secure. At Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea the fate of our western civilization trembled in the balance. Now followed the great creative period in Greek life, during which the Athenian Greeks matured and developed a literature, philosophy, and art which were to be enjoyed not only by themselves, but by all western peoples since their time. In these lines of culture the world will forever remain debtor to this small but active and creative people.

[Illustration: FIG. I. THE EARLY GREEK CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD

The World according to Hecataeus, a geographer of Miletus, Asia Minor.

Hecataeus was the first Greek traveler and geographer. The map dates from

about 500 B.C.]

The next great source of our western civilization was the work of Rome. Like the Greeks, the Romans also occupied a peninsula jutting southward into the Mediterranean, but in most respects they were far different in type. Unlike the active, imaginative, artistic, and creative Greeks, the Romans were a practical, concrete, unimaginative, and executive people. Energy, personality, and executive power were in greatest demand among them.

The work of Rome was political, governmental, and legal—not artistic or intellectual. Rome was strong where Greece was weak, and weak where Greece was strong. As a result the two peoples supplemented one another well in laying the foundations for our western civilization. The conquests of Greece were intellectual; those of Rome legal and governmental. Rome absorbed and amalgamated the whole ancient world into one Empire, to which she gave a common language, dress, manners, religion, literature, and political and legal institutions. Adopting Greek learning and educational practices as her own, she spread them throughout the then-known world. By her political organization she so fixed Roman ideas as to law and government throughout the Empire that Christianity built firmly on the Roman foundations, and the German barbarians, who later swept over the Empire, could neither destroy nor obliterate them. The Roman conquest of the world thus decisively influenced the whole course of western history, spread and perpetuated Greek ideas, and ultimately saved the world from a great disaster.

To Rome, then, we are indebted most of all for ideas as to government, and for the introduction of law and order into an unruly world. In all the intervening centuries between ancient Rome and ourselves, and in spite of many wars and repeated onslaughts of barbarism, Roman governmental law still influences and guides our conduct, and this influence is even yet extending to other lands and other peoples. We are also indebted to Rome for many practical skills and for important engineering knowledge, which was saved and passed on to Western Europe through the medium of the monks. On the other side of the picture, the recent great World War, with all its awful destruction of life and property, and injury to the orderly progress of civilization, may be traced directly to the Roman idea of world empire and the sway of one imperial government, imposing its rule and its culture on the rest of mankind.

Into this Roman Empire, united and made one by Roman arms and government, came the first of the modern forces in the ancient world—that of Christianity—the third great foundation element in our western civilization. Embracing in its early development many Greek philosophical ideas, building securely on the Roman governmental organization, and with its new message for a decaying world, Christianity forms the connecting link between the ancient and modern civilizations. Taking the conception of one God which the Jewish tribes of the East had developed, Christianity changed and expanded this in such a way as to make it a dominant idea in the world. Exalting the teachings of the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the future life, and the need for preparation for a hereafter, Christianity introduced a new type of religion and offered a new hope to the poor and oppressed of the ancient world. In so doing a new ethical force of first importance was added to the effective energies of mankind, and a basis for the education of all was laid, for the first time, in the history of the world.

Christianity came at just the right time not only to impart new energy and hopefulness to a decadent ancient civilization, but also to meet, conquer, and in time civilize the barbarian hordes from the North which overwhelmed the Roman Empire. A new and youthful race of German barbarians now appeared upon the scene, with resulting ravage and destruction, and anarchy and ignorance, and long centuries ensued during which ancient civilization fell prey to savage violence and superstition. Progress ceased in the ancient world. The creative power of antiquity seemed exhausted. The digestive and assimilative powers of the old world seemed gone. Greek was forgotten. Latin was corrupted. Knowledge of the arts and sciences was lost. Schools disappeared. Only the Christian Church remained to save civilization from the wreck, and it, too, was almost submerged in the barbaric flood. It took ten centuries partially to civilize, educate, and mould into homogeneous units this heterogeneous horde of new peoples. During this long period it required the strongest energies of the few who understood to preserve the civilization of the past for the enjoyment and use of a modern world.

Yet these barbarian Germans, great as was the havoc they wrought at first, in time contributed much to the stream of our modern civilization. They brought new conceptions of individual worth and freedom into a world thoroughly impregnated with the ancient idea of the dominance of the State over the individual. The popular assembly, an elective king, and an independent and developing system of law were contributions of first importance which these peoples brought. The individual man and not the State was, with them, the important unit in society. In the hands of the Angles and Saxons, particularly, but also among the Celts, Franks, Helvetii, and Belgae, this idea of individual freedom and of the subordination of the State to the individual has borne large fruit in modern times in the self-governing States of France, Switzerland, Belgium, England and the English self-governing dominions, and in the United States of America. After much experimenting it now seems certain that the Anglo- Saxon type of self-government, as developed first in England and further expanded in the United States, seems destined to be the type of government in future to rule the world.

It took Europe almost ten centuries to recover from the effects of the invasion of barbarism which the last two centuries of the Roman Empire witnessed, to save itself a little later from Mohammedan conquest, and to pick up the lost threads of the ancient life and begin again the work of civilization. Finally, however, this was accomplished, largely as a result of the labor of monks and missionaries. The barbarians were in time induced to settle down to an agricultural life, to accept Christianity in name at least, and to yield a more or less grudging obedience to monk and priest that they might thereby escape the torments of a world to come. Slowly the monasteries and the churches, aided here and there by far- sighted kings, worked at the restoration of books and learning, and finally, first in Italy, and later in the nations evolved from the tribes that had raided the Empire, there came a period of awakening and rediscovery which led to the development of the early university foundations, a wonderful revival of ancient learning, a great expansion of men's thoughts, a great religious awakening, a wonderful period of world exploration and discovery, the founding of new nations in new lands, the reawakening of the spirit of scientific inquiry, the rise of the democratic spirit, and the evolution of our modern civilization.

By the end of the eleventh century it was clear that the long battle for the preservation of civilization had been won, but it was not until the fourteenth century that the Revival of Learning in Italy gave clear evidence of the rise of the modern spirit. By the year 1500 much had been accomplished, and the new modern questioning spirit of the Italian Revival was making progress in many directions. Most of the old learning had been recovered; the printing-press had been invented, and was at work multiplying books; the study of Greek and Hebrew had been revived in the western world; trade and commerce had begun; the cities and the universities which had arisen had become centers of a new life; a new sea route to India had been found and was in use; Columbus had discovered a new world; the Church was more tolerant of new ideas than it had been for centuries; and thought was being awakened in the western world to a degree that had not taken place since the days of ancient Rome. The world seemed about ready for rapid advances in many directions, and great progress in learning, education, government, art, commerce, and invention seemed almost within its grasp. Instead, there soon opened the most bitter and vindictive religious conflict the world has ever known; western Christian civilization was torn asunder; a century of religious warfare ensued; and this was followed by other centuries of hatred and intolerance and suspicion awakened by the great conflict.

Still, out of this conflict, though it for a time checked the orderly development of civilization, much important educational progress was ultimately to come. In promulgating the doctrine that the authority of the Bible in religious matters is superior to the authority of the Church, the basis for the elementary school for the masses of the people, and in consequence the education of all, was laid. This meant the creation of an entirely new type of school—the elementary, for the masses, and taught in the native tongue—to supplement the Latin secondary schools which had been an outgrowth of the revival of ancient learning, and the still earlier cathedral and monastery schools of the Church.

The modern elementary vernacular school may then be said to be essentially a product of the Protestant Reformation. This is true in a special sense among those peoples which embraced some form of the Lutheran or Calvinistic faiths. These were the Germans, Moravians, Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Dutch, Walloons, Swiss, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, French Huguenots, and the English Puritans. As the Renaissance gave a new emphasis to the development of secondary schools by supplying them with a large amount of new subject-matter and a new motive, so the Reformation movement gave a new motive for the education of children not intended for the service of the State or the Church, and the development of elementary vernacular schools was the result. Only in England, of all the revolting countries, did this Protestant conception as to the necessity of education for salvation fail to take deep root, with the result that elementary education in England awaited the new political and social and industrial impulses of the latter half of the nineteenth century for its real development.

The rise of the questioning and inferring spirit in the Italian Renaissance marked the beginnings of the transition from mediaeval to modern attitudes, and one of the most important outgrowths of this was the rise of scientific inquiry which in time followed. This meant the application of human reason to the investigation of the phenomena of nature, with all that this eventually implied. This, slowly to be sure, turned the energies of mankind in a new direction, led to the substitution of inquiry and patient experimentation for assumption and disputation, and in time produced a scientific and industrial revolution which has changed the whole nature of the older problems. The scientific spirit has to-day come to dominate all lines of human thinking, and the applications of scientific principles have, in the past century, completely changed almost all the conditions surrounding human life. Applied to education, this new spirit has transformed the instruction and the methods of the schools, led to the creation of entirely new types of educational institutions, and introduced entirely new aims and methods and purposes into the educational process.

From inquiry into religious matters and inquiry into the phenomena of nature, it was but a short and a natural step to inquiry into the nature and functions of government. This led to a critical questioning of the old established order, the rise of new types of intellectual inquiry, the growth of a consciousness of national problems, and the bringing to the front of questions of political interest to a degree unknown since the days of ancient Rome. The eighteenth century marks, in these directions, a sharp turning-point in human thinking, and the end of mediaevalism and the ushering in of modern forms of intellectual liberty. The eighteenth century, too, witnessed a culmination of a long series of progressive changes which had been under way for centuries, and the flood time of a slowly but steadily rising tide of protest against the enslavement of the intellect and the limitation of natural human liberties by either Church or State. The flood of individualism which characterized the second half of the eighteenth century demanded outlet, and, denied, it rose and swept away ancient privileges, abuses, and barriers—religious, intellectual, social, and political—and opened the way for the marked progress in all lines which characterized the nineteenth century. Out of this new spirit was to come the American and the French Revolutions, the establishment of constitutional liberty and religious freedom, the beginnings of the abolition of privilege, the rise of democracy, a great extension of educational advantages, and the transfer of the control of the school from the Church to the State that the national welfare might be better promoted thereby.

Now arose the modern conception of the school as the great constructive instrument of the State, and a new individual and national theory as to both the nature and the purpose of education was advanced. Schools were declared to be essentially civil affairs; their purpose was asserted to be to promote the common welfare and advance the interests of the political State; ministers of education began to be appointed by the State to take over and exercise control; the citizen supplanted the ecclesiastic in the organization of education and the supervision of classroom teaching; the instruction in the school was changed in direction, and in time vastly broadened in scope; and the education of all now came to be conceived of as a birthright of the child of every citizen.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century a great world movement for the realization of these new aims, through the taking-over of education from religious bodies and the establishment of state-controlled school systems, has taken place. This movement is still going on. Beginning in the nations which were earliest in the front of the struggle to preserve and extend what was so well begun by little Greece and Imperial Rome, the state- control conception of education has, in the past three quarters of a century, spread to every continent on the globe. For ages a Church and private affair, of no particular concern to government and of importance to but a relatively small number of the people, education has to-day become, with the rise and spread of modern ideas as to human freedom, political equality, and industrial progress, a prime essential to the maintenance of good government and the promotion of national welfare, and it is now so recognized by progressive nations everywhere. With the spread of the state-control idea as to education have also gone western ideas as to government, human rights, social obligations, political equality, pure and applied science, trade, industry, transportation, intellectual and moral improvement, and humanitarian influences which are rapidly transforming and modernizing not only less progressive western nations, but ancient civilizations as well, and along the lines so slowly and so painfully worked out by the inheritors of the conceptions of human freedom first thought out in little Greece, and those of political equality and government under law so well worked out by ancient Rome, Western civilization thus promises to become the dominant force in world civilization and human progress, with general education as its agent and greatest constructive force.

Such is a brief outline sketch of the history of the rise and spread and progress of our western civilization, as expressed in the history of the progress of education, and as we shall trace it in much more detail in the chapters which are to follow. The road that man has traveled from the days when might made right, and when children had no claims which the State or parents were bound to respect, to a time when the child is regarded as of first importance, and adults represented in the State declare by law that the child shall be protected and shall have abundant educational advantages, is a long road and at times a very crooked one. Its ups and downs and forward movements have been those of the progress of the race, and in consequence a history of educational progress must be in part a history of the progress of civilization itself. Human civilization, though, represents a more or less orderly evolution, and the education of man stands as one of the highest expressions of a belief in the improvability of the race of which mankind is capable.

It is such a development that we propose to trace, and, having now sketched the broader outlines of the treatment, we next turn to a filling- in of the details, and begin with the Ancient World and the first foundation element as found in the little City-States of ancient Greece.