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.