The History of Education / Educational Practice and Progress Considered as a Phase of the Development and Spread of Western Civilization

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

(For SUPPLEMENTAL REFERENCES, see following chapter.)

CHAPTER II

LATER GREEK EDUCATION

III. THE NEW GREEK EDUCATION

POLITICAL EVENTS: THE GOLDEN AGE OF GREECE. The Battle of Marathon (490 B.C.) has long been considered one of the "decisive battles of the world." Had the despotism of the East triumphed here, and in the subsequent campaign that ended in the defeat of the Persian fleet at Salamis (480 B.C.) and of the Persian army at Plataea (479 B.C.), the whole history of our western world would have been different. The result of the war with Persia was the triumph of this new western democratic civilization, prepared and schooled for great national emergencies by a severe but effective training, over the uneducated hordes led to battle by the autocracy of the East. This was the first, but not the last, of the many battles which western democracy and civilization has had to fight to avoid being crushed by autocracy and despotism. Marathon broke the dread spell of the Persian name and freed the more progressive Greeks to pursue their intellectual and political development. Above all it revealed the strength and power of the Athenians to themselves, and in the half-century following the most wonderful political, literary, and artistic development the world had ever known ensued, and the highest products of Greek civilization were attained. Attica had braved everything for the common cause of Greece, even to leaving Athens to be burned by the invader, and for the next fifty years she held the position of political as well as cultural preëminence among the Greek City-States. Athens now became the world center of wealth and refinement and the home of art and literature (R. 7), and her influence along cultural lines, due in part to her mastery of the sea and her growing commerce, was now extended throughout the Mediterranean world.

From 479 to 431 B.C. was the Golden Age of Greece, and during this short period Athens gave birth to more great men—poets, artists, statesmen, and philosophers—than all the world beside had produced [1] in any period of equal length. Then, largely as a result of the growing jealousy of military Sparta came that cruel and vindictive civil strife, known as the Peloponnesian War, which desolated Greece, left Athens a wreck of her former self, permanently lowered the moral tone of the Greek people, and impaired beyond recovery the intellectual and artistic life of Hellas. For many centuries Athens continued to be a center of intellectual achievement, and to spread her culture throughout a new and a different world, but her power as a State had been impaired forever by a revengeful war between those who should have been friends and allies in the cause of civilization.

TRANSITION FROM OLD TO THE NEW. As early as 509 B.C. a new constitution had admitted all the free inhabitants of Attica to citizenship, and the result was a rapid increase in the prestige, property, and culture of Athens. Citizenship was now open to the commercial classes, and no longer restricted to a small, properly born, and properly educated class. Wealth now became important in giving leisure to the citizen, and was no longer looked down upon as it had been in the earlier period. After the Peloponnesian War the predominance of Attica among the Greek States, the growth of commerce, the constant interchange of embassies, the travel overseas of Athenian citizens, and the presence of many foreigners in the State all alike led to a tolerance of new ideas and a criticism of old ones which before had been unknown. A leisure class now arose, and personal interest came to have a larger place than before, with a consequent change in the earlier conceptions as to the duty of the citizen to the State. Literature lost much of its earlier religious character, and the religious basis of morality [2] began to be replaced by that of reason. Philosophy was now called upon to furnish a practical guide for life to replace the old religious basis. A new philosophy in which "man was the measure of all things" arose, and its teachers came to have large followings. The old search for an explanation of the world of matter [3] was now replaced by an attempt to explain the world of ideas and emotions, with a resulting evolution of the sciences of philosophy, ethics, and logic. It was a period of great intellectual as well as political change and expansion, and in consequence the old education, which had answered well the needs of a primitive and isolated community, now found itself but poorly adapted to meet the larger needs of the new cosmopolitan State. [4] The result was a material change in the old education to adapt it to the needs of the new Athens, now become the intellectual center of the civilized world.

CHANGES IN THE OLD EDUCATION. A number of changes in the character of the old education were now gradually introduced. The rigid drill of the earlier period began to be replaced by an easier and a more pleasurable type of training. Gymnastics for personal enjoyment began to replace drill for the service of the State, and was much less rigid in type. The old authors, who had rendered important service in the education of youth, began to be replaced by more modern writers, with a distinct loss of the earlier religious and moral force. New musical instruments, giving a softer and more pleasurable effect, took the place of the seven-stringed lyre, and complicated music replaced the simple Doric airs of the earlier period. Education became much more individual, literary, and theoretical. Geometry and drawing were introduced as new studies. Grammar and rhetoric began to be studied, discussion was introduced, and a certain glibness of speech began to be prized. The citizen-cadet years, from sixteen to twenty, formerly devoted to rather rigorous physical training, were now changed to school work of an intellectual type.

NEW TEACHERS; THE SOPHISTS. New teachers, known as Sophists, who professed to be able to train men for a political career, [5] began to offer a more practical course designed to prepare boys for the newer type of state service. These in time drew many Ephebes into their private schools, where the chief studies were on the content, form, and practical use of the Greek language. Rhetoric and grammar before long became the master studies of this new period, as they were felt to prepare boys better for the new political and intellectual life of Hellas than did the older type of training. In the schools of the Sophists boys now spent their time in forming phrases, choosing words, examining grammatical structure, and learning how to secure rhetorical effect. Many of these new teachers made most extravagant claims for their instruction (R. 8) and drew much ridicule from the champions of the older type of education, but within a century they had thoroughly established themselves, and had permanently changed the character of the earlier Greek education.

By 350 B.C. we find that Greek school education had been differentiated into three divisions, as follows: