FOOTNOTES
[52] Περὶ ἀντιδόσεως, p. 98 sq.
CHAPTER X.
THE GREEK THEORISTS ON EDUCATION—PLATO AND ARISTOTLE.
§ 62. It is usual in books on Greek education to give a very large space to the discussion of the “Republic” and “Laws” of Plato and the “Politics” of Aristotle, because they contain elaborate and systematic recommendations as to the training of youth. But the states of both philosophers are ideal, Aristotle’s not less than Plato’s; and, though the educational portion of Aristotle’s work seems fragmentary and unfinished, we cannot hold that any further developments would have brought it within the range of practical politics. Plato’s notions were confessedly theoretical, and are discussed as such by all his commentators; but some scholars have given themselves endless trouble to find out how much of his system, especially in the tamer and less extravagant “Laws,” was borrowed from real life, and from actual states, as opposed to the creations of his own fancy. But in nearly every detail the distinction is purely conjectural. It is really for want of positive evidence that these theories have assumed such undue importance. To the philosophical theorist and the educational reformer the speculations of such splendid intellects in the early post-meridian of the glorious day of Greece must ever be most attractive and suggestive; but it is idle to transfer to a practical book, or to an historical account, what has never been realized.[53] These speculations, however, may fairly find a limited space here as showing what general effect the practical education already described had produced upon the most advanced thinkers of the day.
Unfortunately, we have here again only the aristocratic side, and that which would assert the State to be paramount and all-interfering through individual and private life. If we had the speculations of Lycophron and his school, who held, with truly democratical instinct, that laws were only useful to repress crime, and that the rest of the citizen’s life was to be left free and uncontrolled, our notions about the theories of Greek education might be considerably modified. But, on the other hand, we have preserved to us the Hellene of the Hellenes; the school of Lycophron might only have recommended to us what we know by practical experience in modern society.
From the very outset Plato and Aristotle adopt quite definite principles. They assume that the State is to interfere everywhere and control the whole life of man. Thus the splendid Athenian democracy in which Plato lived had no power to wean him from his somewhat narrow prejudices. He despised the goods he possessed, and longed for a Spartan ideal, though its defects were plain enough before his eyes.[54] Still worse, the wide vista opened by Alexander into a larger fusion of ideas, and into widely various forms of society, had no power to emancipate the intellect of Aristotle from its ingrained Hellenic narrowness. It is necessary to make this strong protest at the outset, on account of the chorus of admiration sung by the pedants and pedagogues of modern days over these thoroughly unpractical and retrograde theories. One fact will speak volumes to the modern reader. Both of them look upon a small number of citizens, and, indeed, a small limit of territory, as essential to their schemes, no accurate or perpetual supervision by State police and direction being possible either in a great city or a large territory.[55] This will in itself show how antiquated they must have seemed even in the next century, when the Greeks woke to the ambition of ruling over kingdoms in the East.
§ 63. And yet there were some points on which these thinkers, especially Plato, were far more thoroughgoing than we are, chiefly from a total absence of that sentiment or sentimentality which infects modern life. For Plato, both in the “Republic” and the “Laws,” insists that education will be of little avail if children are brought into the world deformed in body and warped in mind by the bad physical and mental condition of their parents. On some of these cases Greek society was agreed with him. In most states a deformed child was exposed either to die or to be picked up by some one who might run the risk of bringing it up to make a household slave.[56] For in most states, and certainly at Sparta, it would have been held a crime to propagate hereditary disease; and men were spared the disgusting spectacle of the scrofulous or deaf-and-dumb heir to a great name being courted in matrimony to perpetuate the miseries or the vices of his progenitors.
But Plato went further, and held that the production of the most important animal, man, should be regulated with even more care than that of the lower animals, in which such striking results have been obtained by artificial selection. He therefore recommended, in his ideal State, not community of wives—Heaven forbid that we should follow Aristotle in repeating this gross libel!—but a careful State selection of suitable pairs, and their solemn union, under the guise of a direction from Providence by an appeal to the lot. These marriages were to take place at a fixed season, and all the children born of them within the year to be regarded the common children of all: here the word community may fairly apply. He has nowhere told us whether in successive years the same parents were to remain united, and hence we do not know whether his marriages were meant to be temporary or not. I fancy the point was of little importance to him. If the offspring turned out well, there would be no change; if badly, of course the guardians of the State would not sanction the continuance of an unwholesome union. Thus, though Plato was willing to allow sentiment its sentimental place, and to bring forward the decision of the rulers of the State as the will of Providence, marriages professedly arranged in heaven were to be permitted only with a strict view to the improvement of the race.
The objection that such an arrangement would destroy the sanctity and the influence of the family, and thus abolish our most powerful engine of early education, was no objection to Plato. He wished to abolish separate families, and rescue children from the tyranny, the indulgence, and incompetence of individual parents, so as to put them under state discipline. And the State was absolutely nothing but one huge family, as far as the higher classes were concerned. To us who live in large kingdoms, who know that the family gives the law for individuals in ordinary life, and that schemes of public education cannot replace it, all systems which abolish the sanctity of the home are inadmissible.
§ 64. No point in Plato’s scheme excites more sympathy nowadays with advanced thinkers than that of equalizing the sexes in education, and subjecting women to the same training and duties as men. For he held that, though nature had not made women as strong as men, and that their important functions in the production of the race put them under some inconveniences and disabilities, there was, nevertheless, no reason to assume any permanent difference in kind. If such a theory is thought revolutionary by most people in modern society, what must it have been in the days and among the people of Plato’s age! Here, again, what guided him was an exaggerated estimate of the liberty and importance of Spartan women, who, when young, were encouraged to exercise in public; and who, when married, maintained over their husbands an influence far exceeding that of women in other Greek households. But then we must not forget the small culture of the men, their devotion to military training, and the consequent necessity for women to use their own judgment in the management of their homes.
§ 65. On the other hand, if we may digress for a moment on account of the interest and importance of the subject, there is no valid reason why the physical production of the race should not receive infinitely more attention than it does within the bounds of our present social arrangements. In the first place, though the sentimental reasons for marrying are still put in the foreground, and though at wedding speeches and in amatory correspondences some divine predestination, or the sentimental compulsion called falling in love, is assumed the only efficient cause of marriages, we know that many reasonable considerations intervene and are the real motives of action. These motives—the acquisition of wealth or position or connection, the desire of home comforts and of a life independent of external amusements, a calm mutual respect—are commonly enough confessed even by the very people who parade sentimental reasons; and whenever a marriage appears suitable from rational considerations, no trouble is spared by match-makers to induce young people to imagine themselves drawn together by some subtle and sentimental affinity—like Plato’s guardians, who were to pretend the providential lot as their guide.
If, then, such be the case; if even now there are civilized countries and classes of people who openly profess prudential reasons as the best for marrying, it will only require a better education of public opinion to enable men to advance to the position that the physical and mental vigor of the resulting children is a motive to be consciously considered in the selection. We may first reach the stage of avoiding an hereditary taint as people now fly an infectious disease. Such avoidance would ultimately stamp out or reduce to a minimum this evil, and the race would escape a great part of the direst and most hopeless of its physical miseries. Then the systematic and deliberate desire that there should be healthy children will discover many conditions now unknown, when so many of our unions are the result of chance or avarice, or, still worse, of passion. Men of science will begin to make observations on the difference of physical antecedents which cause such curious differences in children of the same house. And the day will come when, from a body of such observations, valuable practical rules may be deduced. We may thus improve our race as the Spartans did in old Greece; and they, we know, were perfectly successful in obtaining what they sought—a high average of physical strength and beauty.
All this, we may hope, will only be the introduction to a far more important, but far more difficult, problem—the determining of the conditions which produce genius. There is no reason to doubt that these conditions are mainly transient, for genius is no fixed heritage, the most splendid instances coming from obscure and ordinary parents. Nor does the mere combination of the suitable parents work its effect uniformly without other more limited conditions. For we find the great leaders of the world sometimes the only child, sometimes eldest, sometimes youngest, or in the middle of a family of brothers and sisters as obscure as their parents. The careful observation, then, not only of the parents, but of the particular passage in their life which produced an intellectually splendid offspring, is one upon which we cannot expect light for a long time, and until people have become accustomed to regard the general improvement of the race of far greater importance than they now do. If such results could be obtained even approximately—if, even in one case out of ten, intellectual excellence could be produced as we reproduce physical perfections—then, indeed, the perfectibility of mankind would no longer be a vague dream, but would show some signs of a partial fulfilment.
Are we to hope that such an advance in ideas will take place in our own day? We have perhaps advanced beyond the stage when men regard genius as distinctly heaven-born, and the direct gift of the gods, apart from any natural conditions. If it is indeed heaven-born, it is now conceded to be such through the combination of natural causes. But, on the other hand, our best and most refined people will recoil with deep aversion from making a scientific analysis of such conditions; they will exclaim that the possible advantages are as nothing compared with the desecration of that mystery which has been hallowed by the sacraments of the Church, and protected from profane inquiry by a cloud of delicate sentiment. To reduce the holy estate of marriage to the deliberate and scientific production of conditioned offspring will destroy, say they, all the sanctity of the relation, and with it the purity and dignity of our homes.
These weighty and respectable objections are to be met by observing that it would be idle and wrong to attempt any reform in opposition to the unanimous sentiment of the very people who alone could carry it out—our most sober and refined classes. Until this sentiment can be gradually changed by argument, and come to be looked on as a venerable and amiable superstition, nothing will be accomplished. But it is a matter of history that the most respectable and hallowed sentiments, if irrational, can be gradually removed by a progress in what Mr. Lecky calls rationalism, or intellectual enlightenment. We can even now point to the important fact, that in those countries and those ages where marriages had been confessedly arranged from prudential reasons, they have not been less sacred, nor has home life been less pure, than where vague and irrational sentiments have been brought into the foreground. The lower-class Irish are as faithful and happy in their homes, and the marriage-tie is a sacred and honored as it is anywhere in the world; and yet among them a love-match is rare. It is a matter of cows and of pigs, of the succession to a farm—nay, often of arrangement by the landlord for reasons of his own; and yet these marriages are as happy and as pure as if they had been the outcome of a great mutual passion. The same thing may be said of married life in the country parts of France, where a thrifty and provident race accommodate their unions to their circumstances, and leave the extravagances of great passion to poets and Parisians.
The history of Greece offers a more notable instance. If we ask where in Greece the home enjoyed the greatest honor and sanctity, where the house-mother stood highest in reverence and social importance, and where violations of fidelity were rarest, no one would hesitate to answer, At Sparta. Yet at Sparta all the sentiment, all the delicacy, of the marriage-tie was sacrificed to the duty of producing healthy children for the State. Plutarch tells us of a state of things which modern people would think wholly subversive of all purity—of old men ceding their rights of temporary unions and exchanges for the sake of desirable offspring. The Spartan men and women were not wanting in sentiment about marriage, in advocating the honor and sanctity of the marriage-tie; but their sentiment led them to regard a fine offspring as the noblest outcome of marriage, and one to which all other considerations were secondary. Hence it was in accordance with their sentiment that they adopted the same kind of precautions as regards physical perfection which a later and wiser age may adopt as regards intellectual and moral perfection.
This possibility of improving intellect by careful selection was beyond Plato’s vision; he only thought of physical qualities in the arrangement of his unions. But it is one of the most remarkable points in his exclusive and aristocratic society that he makes provision for the adopting of any particularly bright child of the operative class among his guardians, so that they might benefit by the accident. The degradation of poor or unhealthy children of the higher class is also contemplated.
His arrangement of the years of education is as follows: It is divided into three parts. Beginning with the learning of proper myths and tales, it proceeds to easy gymnastic, followed by music and poetry, with reading, writing, arithmetic, and some elementary mathematics, all of which occupy from the seventh to the eighteenth year, and thus correspond to our schooling. Then comes military training up to the twentieth year—a division to which we, who have no conscription, have no analogy, as the Germans have. Next follows the second division of higher studies in pure and applied mathematics for ten years, and the third in metaphysic for five years. These are, of course, quite wide of any practical scheme, and are intended to form those philosophic rulers who will regard their whole life here as a preparation for a higher sphere.
§ 66. His views on the details of music and gymnastic were not materially different from those of the practical educators which we have discussed, save that he proposes to train his guardian class with more detail and circumstance than were possible for any ordinary public.
He is unpractical, and even absurd, in his curious prudery about the tales and legends which children are to learn. He objects to Homer, to the tragedies, still more to the comedies, and, no doubt, to the folk-lore of the day, as inculcating base and immoral views of the gods and their relations to men. Fairy tales are always to represent God as one and as perfectly good. He even goes so far—but here he can hardly be in earnest—as to recommend that children shall learn by heart his laws instead of poetry and myths![57] Throughout all his remarks on this subject, he evidently ignores the culture of the imagination as such, which we recognize as so important that we even tolerate or overlook immoralities or manifest fictions in aiming at this kind of amusement and culture of children. Indeed, it is certain that when children are taught fairy tales as such, the immoral acts of real life, such as robbery and murder, are only accessories to the imaginary life, in which there is generally some rude justice.
Even apart from this particular question, we find all through Plato’s theory of education a very mischievous dislike of any liberty of opinion, or liberty of life, in the youth of his State. He goes so far in the “Laws” as to make heresy of opinion penal, and to punish with imprisonment those who will not conform to the doctrines of the lawgiver. If there be anything which would tempt us to reject the “Laws,” as not the genuine work of Socrates’ disciple, it is this strange narrowness of view, which makes Grote argue that the actual Athens of Plato’s day was superior to the ideal he constructed. But doctrinaires of all ages hate human liberty. Nor do the Greeks ever seem to have been forced by the pressure of circumstances to mark off the close of formal education by a fixed period, like our graduation at a university, when the young man is expected to strike out into the world and henceforth educate himself in practical life.
§ 67. The educational book of Aristotle’s “Politics” (VII. in the now received order) is a mere fragment, which suggests many problems, and solves but few. Even with the help of some important corrections from the “Ethics,” we find it the narrow and old-fashioned scheme of a pedant Greek, written with admiration for the artificial discipline of Sparta, and unable to understand even the far more splendid Hellenic ideal sketched by Thucydides in his speech of Pericles. We know, however, from the “Ethics” that he felt the essential importance of family ties between husband and wife, between parents and children. Hence he rejects Plato’s proposal of abolishing the family, and insists that the ideal State must consist of households in the strict sense. But, on the other hand, he quite agrees with Plato’s view that the social and moral aspects of marriage are by no means inconsistent with a strict supervision of the producing of healthy children by the State. He foreshadowed the state of things anticipated above, when husband and wife will still feel the deep sanctity and thorough loyalty of their relation, and yet not leave to mere accident the most important product, nay, the only product, so far as the State is concerned, of their union. He is just as careful as Plato in recommending care of unborn children by attention to their mothers’ air and exercise. He is still more ruthless in advocating the destruction, either before or after birth, of illegitimate offspring. Neither can he, any more than Plato, imagine an ideal state capable of such expansion as to contain a great people, nor can he dispense with disabilities for most of its members, such as slaves and operatives.
He does not contemplate the very long and elaborate after-training of Plato’s guardians, for he does not conceive this world as a preparation for another, but as an end in itself. And it is probably for this reason that he is so superior to Plato in analyzing the function of refined recreation, and the ennoblement of leisure by æsthetic pleasures. Thus he sees that music is to be utilized as a recreation for youth, as well as for a moral engine of education. He has explained in his “Poetic” that dramatic poetry is not mere fiction, to be banished from the ideal State as teaching falsehood or depicting crime, but a representation of human life deeper and more philosophic than history, inasmuch as history only widens the intellect, while the drama also purifies the emotions of the spectator. It may even be argued that history widens the intellect only so far as it is conceived as a drama—a development of human character—and not as a mere recitation of facts.
While he does not enounce so clearly as Plato that gymnastics are mainly a training for the character, he sets his face against that physical training which studies nothing but the development of muscle, on the ground that, if at all excessive, it defeats its own object by engendering an unhealthy state; and that, as we cannot work the body and the mind together with any severity, it must generally coincide with ignorance or with an illiterate life. Even the Spartan military training, which was opposed by them to athletic training, falls under his censure.
He will not concede, with Plato, the equality in kind of the sexes, but thinks the functions of women are distinct in kind from those of men, and therefore not to be perfected by adopting the same training. Thus he is, on the whole, tamer and more conservative, but also less suggestive, than his great master.
§ 68. The main value of his fragment on education is that it shows how thoroughly the subject had been discussed in his day. Thus, after determining that the civic side of the citizen is all-important, and that, therefore, all education must be public and the same for all, as in Sparta, he proceeds thus with his argument:[58] “What, then, is education, and how are we to educate? For there is as yet no agreement on the point; all men are not of the same opinion as to what the young should learn either with a view to perfection or to the best life; nor is it agreed whether education is to aim at the development of the intellect or the moral character. Nay, more; from the ordinary standpoint the matter is quite confused, and it is not clear to anybody whether we are to train in what leads to virtue, in what is useful for ordinary life, or in abstract science. All these alternatives have their advocates. Again, as regards what leads to virtue, there is no general consent, for since men do not agree in what they honor as such, of course they cannot agree about the training to obtain it. As regards what is useful for life, it is obvious that there are certain indispensable things which must be taught, and it is equally clear that there are others which must not. All occupations are divided into those which a free man should practise and those which he should not, and, therefore, this affords us a limitation in the learning of useful arts.” He goes on to show that no trade is gentlemanly if it injuriously affects the body, or enslaves the mind by being practised for hire. Even the fine arts, if studied in this way, or professionally, are to him an unworthy occupation, and are only to be pursued in youth as a recreation or æsthetic training; so that in middle life men may be competent judges of such productions, and either better able to enjoy them (as in music), or less likely to be deceived (as in the purchase of works of art). Having applied these principles to athletics, about which he says little save in recommendation of moderation, and against any professional training, he turns to the question of music, on which we have already given the views which he held in common with the most serious Greek educators. On this subject, too, there was controversy. He has before him three theories: is it mere amusement (παιδία), or an engine of education (παιδεία), or an æsthetic pleasure (διαγωγή)?[59] Perhaps we have dwelt too long on these theories, but it seemed desirable to give the reader the locus classicus on the Hellenic theory of music, which was discussed above ([§ 43]), and which, in spite of all our studies of Greek life, is still quite strange and incredible to modern theorists in education.
§ 69. There is yet another scheme of education left us by the classical age of Greece, Xenophon’s “Education of Cyrus,” which, in the form of a very tedious novel on the life of the Persian king, gives a theory of the education of a prince and his surroundings which may deserve a very few words in concluding this chapter.[60] He shares with Plato and Aristotle the belief that private education, with mere prohibitive laws to guide the citizen, is quite insufficient. All the theorists were agreed that there must be one public education, and they imagined that crime would be to a great extent precluded by such effective training.
Xenophon, dividing his period of education into boyhood up to sixteen, and youth (ἐφηβεία) up to twenty-six, provides a regular public-school education for the boys, keeping them all together in a sort of polity of their own, where their teaching is performed by special State masters, and their quarrels and delinquencies settled by tribunals of their own. To the elder youth is assigned all the police and patrol duty, as well as the accompanying of the king in hunting, especially of beasts of prey. This sort of exercise Xenophon had learned to know in the East, and he recognized its superiority over ordinary gymnastics. But the musical education, on which Plato and Aristotle lay such stress, he omits altogether, without giving his reasons. Perhaps he found from experience that the great Aryan nobles were men of refinement, and understood the harmony of life no less than the more theoretical Greeks. He also differs from them in alone recognizing the importance of a system which will control not one limited city, but an empire of various peoples and languages. Yet his education is, in consequence, only the expensive and exclusive training of a dominant aristocracy, and is not supposed to be compulsory for the ordinary citizen. In his State all higher official position is only to be attained by this training.
There are no other ideas in the scheme which make it worthy of any special consideration. The Spartan system blinded the vision of all these speculators, and kept them from understanding the true character of a free and various development of individual genius.