Читать книгу The History of Education - Ellwood Patterson Cubberley - Страница 52

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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