1. Primary education, covering the years from seven or eight to thirteen, and embracing reading, writing, arithmetic, and chanting. The teacher of this school came to be known as a grammatist.
2. Secondary education, covering the years from thirteen to sixteen, and embracing geometry, drawing, and a special music course. Later on some grammar and rhetoric were introduced into this school. The teacher of this school came to be known as a grammaticus.
3. Higher or university education, covering the years after sixteen.
THE FLOOD OF INDIVIDUALISM. This period of artistic and intellectual brilliancy of Greece following the Peloponnesian War marked the beginning of the end of Greece politically. The war was a blow to the strength of Greece from which the different States never recovered. Greece was bled white by this needless civil strife. The tendencies toward individualism in education were symptomatic of tendencies in all forms of social and political life. The philosophers—Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle—proposed ideal remedies for the evils of the State, [6] but in vain. The old ideal of citizenship died out. Service to the State became purely subordinate to personal pleasure and advancement. Irreverence and a scoffing attitude became ruling tendencies. Family morality decayed. The State in time became corrupt and nerveless. Finally, in 338 B.C., Philip of Macedon became master of Greece, and annexed it to the world empire which he and his son Alexander created. Still later, in 146 B.C., the new world power to the west, Rome, conquered Greece and made of it a Roman province.
Though dead politically, there now occurred the unusual spectacle of "captive Greece taking captive her rude conqueror," and spreading Greek art, literature, philosophy, science, and Greek ideas throughout the Mediterranean world. It was the Greek higher learning that now became predominant and exerted such great influence on the future of our world civilization. It remains now to trace briefly the development and spread of this higher learning, and to point out how thoroughly it modified the thinking of the future.
NEW SCHOOLS; SOCRATES. In the beginning each Sophist teacher was a free lance, and taught what he would and in the manner he thought best. Many of them made extraordinary efforts to attract students and win popular approval and fees. Plato represents the Sophist Protagoras as saying, with reference to a youth ambitious for success in political life, "If he comes to me he will learn that which he comes to learn." At first the instruction was largely individual, but later classes were organized. Isocrates, who lived from 436 to 338 B.C., organized the instruction for the first time into a well-graded sequence of studies, with definite aims and work (R. 8). He shifted the emphasis in instruction from training for success in argumentation, to training to think clearly and to express ideas properly. His pupils were unusually successful, and his school did much to add to the fame of Athens as an intellectual center. From his work sprang a large number of so called Rhetorical Schools, much like our better private schools and academies, offering to those Ephebes who could afford to attend a very good preparation for participation in the public life of the period.
In contrast with the Sophists, a series of schools of philosophy also arose in Athens. These in a way were the outgrowth of the work of Socrates. Accepting the Sophists' dictum that "man is the measure of all things," he tried to turn youths from the baser individualism of the Sophists of his day to the larger general truths which measure the life of a true man. In particular he tried to show that the greatest of all arts— the art of living a good life—called for correct individual thinking and a knowledge of the right. "Know thyself" was his great guiding principle. His emphasis was on the problems of everyday morality. Frankly accepting the change from the old education as a change that could not be avoided, he sought to formulate a new basis for education in personal morality and virtue, and as a substitute for the old training for service to the State. He taught by conversation, engaging men in argument as he met them in the street, and showing to them their ignorance (R. 9). Even in Athens, where free speech was enjoyed more than anywhere else in the world at that time, such a shrewd questioner would naturally make enemies, and in 399 B.C. at the age of seventy-one, he was condemned to death by the Athenian populace on the charge of impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens.
[Illustration: FIG. 12 SOCRATES (469-399 B.C.)
(After a marble bust in the Vatican Gallery, at Rome)]
Socrates' greatest disciple was a citizen of wealth by the name of Plato, who had abandoned a political career for the charms of philosophy, and to him we owe our chief information as to the work and aims of Socrates. In 386 B.C. he founded the Academy, where he passed almost forty years in lecturing and writing. His school, which formed a model for others, consisted of a union of teachers and students who possessed in common a chapel, library, lecture-rooms, and living-rooms. Philosophy, mathematics, and science were taught, and women as well as men were admitted.
Other schools of importance in Athens were the Lyceum, founded in 335 B.C. by a foreign-born pupil of Plato's by the name of Aristotle, who did a remarkable work in organizing the known knowledge of his time; [7] the school of the Stoics, founded by Zeno in 308 B.C.; and the school of the Epicureans, founded by Epicurus in 306 B.C. Each of these schools offered a philosophical solution of the problem of life, and Plato and Aristotle wrote treatises on education as well. Each school evolved into a form of religious brotherhood which perpetuated the organization after the death of the master. In time these became largely schools for expounding the philosophy of the founder.