Читать книгу Old Greek Education - J. P. Mahaffy - Страница 3
ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION.
§ 1. We hear it often repeated that human nature is the same at all times and in all places; and this is urged at times and places where it is so manifestly false that we feel disposed peremptorily to deny it when paraded to us as a general truth. The fact is that only in its lower activities does human nature show any remarkable uniformity; so far as men are mere animals, they have strong resemblances, and in savages even their minds seem to originate the same fancies in various ages and climes. But when we come to higher developments, to the spiritual element in individuals, to the social and political relations of civilized men, the pretended truism gives way more and more to the opposite truth, that mankind varies at all times and in all places. As no two individuals, when carefully examined, are exactly alike, so no two societies of men are even nearly alike; and at the present time there is probably no more fertile cause of political and legislative blundering than the assumption that the constitution successfully worked out by one people can be transferred by the force of a mere decree to its neighbors. All the recent experiments in state-reform have been based on this assumption, as if the transferrence of a House of Commons in any real sense were not as impossible as the transferrence of Eton and of Oxford to some foreign society.
Although, therefore, we cannot deny that past history contains many fruitful lessons for the bettering of our own time, it is not unlikely that the tendency of the present widely informed but hasty age is to exaggerate the likenesses of various epochs, and to overrate the force of analogy in social and political reasoning. Historical parallels are generally striking only up to a certain point; a deeper knowledge discloses elements of contrast, wide differences of motive, great variations in human feeling.
§ 2. But as we go back to simpler states of life, or earlier stages of development, the argument from analogy becomes stronger, and the lessons we may derive from history, though less striking, are more trustworthy. This is peculiarly the case with the problem of education as handled by civilized nations in various ages. The material to be worked upon is that simpler and fresher human nature, in which varieties are due only to heredity, and not yet to the numerous artificial stimulants and restraints which every society of mature men invents for itself. The games and sports of children, all over the world, are as uniform as the weapons and designs of savages. The delights and disappointments of education have also remained the same, at least in many respects. The conflict of theoretical and practical educators, and the failure of splendid schemes for the reform of society by a systematic training of youth, mark every over-ripe civilization. Here, then, if anywhere, we may gain a distinct advantage by contemplating the problems, which we ourselves are solving, under discussion in a remote society. The more important and permanent elements will stand out clearer when freed from the interests and prejudices of our own day, and from the necessities of our own situation; and thus we may be taught to regain freedom of judgment and escape from the iron despotism of a traditional system. For if it be the case that in no department of our life are we more thoroughly enslaved than on the question of education, if it be true that we are obliged here to submit our children to the ignorance and prejudice of nurses, governesses, priests, pedants—all following more or less stupid traditions, and all coerced by shackles which they want either the knowledge or the power to break—then any inquiry which may lead us to consider freely and calmly what is right and what is not right, what is possible and what is not possible, in education cannot but have real value, apart from purely historical or learned considerations.
§ 3. In fact, the main object of this book is to interest men who are not classical scholars, and who are not professional educators, in the theory of education as treated by that people which is known to have done more than any other in fitting its members for the higher ends and enjoyments of life. The Greeks were far behind us in the mechanical aids to human progress; they understood not the use of electricity, or of steam, or of gunpowder, or of printing. But, in spite of this, the Greek public was far better educated than we are—nay, to some extent, because of this it was better educated. For Greek life afforded proper leisure for thorough intellectual training, and this includes first of all such political training as is strange to almost the whole of Europe; secondly, moral training of so high a kind as to rival at times the light of revelation; thirdly, social training to something higher than music and feasting by way of recreation; and, fourthly, artistic training, which, while it did not condescend to bad imitations of great artists, taught the public to understand and to love true and noble ideals.
Why must these great ends of education be obscured or lost by the modern wonders of discovery, which should make them more easy of attainment and wider in circulation? Were the Greeks better off in education than we are, and, if so, why were they better off? or is all this alleged Greek superiority an idle dream of the pedants, with no solid basis in facts? If it is real, can we not discover the secret of their superiority, and use it with far wider and deeper effect in our Christian society? or is human nature of narrow and fixed capacity, and does the addition of wide ranges of positive science and of various tongues mar irrevocably the cultivation of the pure reason and of the æsthetic faculty? These are the problems which will occupy the following pages, not in their abstract form; they will be considered in close relation to the success or failure of the old Greeks in discussing and solving them.
§ 4. There have been only two earlier nations and one later which could compete with the Greeks in their treatment of this perpetual problem in human progress. We have first the Egyptian nation, which by its thorough and widely diffused culture attained a duration of national prosperity and happiness perhaps never since equalled. Isolated from other civilized races by geographical position, by language, and in consequence by social institutions, the Egyptians prosecuted internal development more assiduously than is the wont of mere conquering races. The few foreign possessions acquired by the Egyptians were never assimilated, and the civilization of the Nile remained isolated and unique. We have reason to know that this refined social life, which is perpetuated in pictures on the monuments of the land—this large and various literature, of which so many fragments have been recovered in our century—was not created without a diffused and systematic education. In Plato’s “Laws,”[1] the training of their young children in elementary science is described as far superior to anything in Greece. But, unfortunately, the materials for any estimate of Egyptian education, in its process, are wanting. We can see plainly its great national effects; we have even some details as to the special training in separate institutions of a learned and literary class; but nothing more has yet been recovered. If we knew the various steps by which Moses became “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” an interesting field of comparison would be opened to us; and here, no doubt, we should find some of our own difficulties discussed and perhaps solved by early sages, still more by an enlightened public opinion, showing itself in the establishment of sound traditions. And, no doubt, from the dense population, the subdivision of property and of labor, and the absence of a great territorial aristocracy, the education of the Egyptians must have corresponded to our middle-class and primary systems, together with special institutions for the higher training of the professions and of the literary caste.
§ 5. If we could command our material, we might seek elsewhere for analogies to the education of our nobility and higher gentry. We know through Greek and Roman sources, as well as through the heroic poetry of the “Shahnameh,” that the Aryan nobles who became, under Cyrus, the rulers of Western Asia, were in character, as they were in blood, allied to the Germanic chiefs and Norse Vikings, with their love of daring adventure, their chivalry, and their intense loyalty to their appointed sovereign. In these qualities they were strangely opposed to the democratic Greeks, on whom they looked with contempt, while they were appreciated in return only by a few such men as Herodotus and Xenophon. Indeed, such devotion to their sovereign as made them leap overboard to lighten his ship in a storm was confounded by the Greeks with slavish submission, Oriental prostrations, and other signs of humiliation. Nevertheless, the men whom the Greeks long dared not look in the face—the conquerors of half the known world, the successful rivals of the Romans for the dominion of the East—faced death under Xerxes and the last Darius with other feelings than those of slavish submission. Herodotus, in his interesting and sympathetic account of them, says their children’s education consisted of three things—to ride, to shoot, and to tell the truth. If he had added a chivalrous loyalty to their kings like that of the French nobles in the last century, he would have completed the picture, and sketched a training which many an English gentleman considers little short of perfection.
§ 6. The Romans are the only other ancient people who stand near enough to us to suggest an inquiry into their education. And it may be said that they combined the dignity of noble traditions with the practical instincts of a successful trading people. Hence Roman education, if carried on with system, ought of all others to correspond with that of Englishmen, who should combine the same qualities in carrying out an analogous policy, and in filling, to some extent, a similar position in the world. But so closely was all Roman culture based on Greek books and models that, although every people must develop individual features of its own—and the Romans had plenty of them, as we may see from Quintilian—any philosophical knowledge of Roman education must depend upon a previous knowledge of the Greeks. In many respects the Romans were a race more congenial to the English, and hence by us more easily understood. In the coarser and stronger elements of human character, in directness and love of truth, in a certain contempt of æsthetics and of speculation, in a blunt assertion of the supremacy of practical questions, in a want of sympathy, and often a stupid ignorance and neglect of the character and requirements of subject races, the Romans are the true forerunners of the English in history. Burdened as we are with these defects of national character, the products of the subtler and more genial, if less solid and truthful, Hellenic race are particularly well worth our consideration. This has been so thoroughly recognized by thoughtful men in our generation as to require no further support by argument. It only remains that each of our Hellenists should do his best, in some distinct line, to make the life of the Greeks known to us with fairness and accuracy.
