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

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

ALEXANDRIA SAPPED IN TURN. In 30 B.C. Alexandria, too, came under Roman rule and was, in turn, gradually sapped by Rome. Greek influence continued, but the interest became largely philosophical. Ultimately Alexandria became the seat of a metaphysical school of Christian theology, and the scene of bitter religious controversies. In 330 A.D., Constantinople was founded on the site of the earlier Byzantium, and soon thereafter Greek scholars transferred their interest to it and made it a new center of Greek learning. There Greek science, literature, and philosophy were preserved for ten centuries, and later handed back to a Europe just awakening from the long intellectual night of the Middle Ages. In 640 A.D. Alexandria was taken by the Mohammedans, and the university ceased to exist. The great library was destroyed, furnishing, it is said, "fuel sufficient for four thousand public baths for a period of six months," and Greek learning was extinguished in the western world.

OUR DEBT TO HELLAS. As a political power the Greek States left the world nothing of importance. As a people they were too individualistic, and seemed to have a strange inability to unite for political purposes. To the new power slowly forming to the westward—Rome—was left the important task, which the Greek people were never able to accomplish, of uniting civilization into one political whole. The world conquest that Greece made was intellectual. As a result, her contribution to civilization was artistic, literary, philosophical, and scientific, but not political. The Athenian Greeks were a highly artistic and imaginative rather than a practical people. They spent their energy on other matters than government and conquest. As a result the world will be forever indebted to them for an art and a literature of incomparable beauty and richness which still charms mankind; a philosophy which deeply influenced the early Christian religion, and has ever since tinged the thinking of the western world; and for many important beginnings in scientific knowledge which were lost for ages to a world that had no interest in or use for science. So deeply has our whole western civilization been tinctured by Greek thought that one enthusiastic writer has exclaimed,—"Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin." [14] (R. 11)

In education proper the old Athenian education offers us many lessons of importance that we of to-day may well heed. In the emphasis they placed on moral worth, education of the body as well as the mind, and moderation in all things, they were much ahead of us. Their schools became a type for the cities of the entire Mediterranean world, being found from the Black Sea south to the Persian Gulf and westward to Spain. When Rome became a world empire the Greek school system was adopted, and in modified form became dominant in Rome and throughout the provinces, while the universities of the Greek cities for long furnished the highest form of education for ambitious Roman youths. In this way Greek influence was spread throughout the Mediterranean world. The higher learning of the Greeks, preserved first at Athens and Alexandria, and later at Constantinople, was finally handed back to the western world at the time of the Italian Revival of Learning, after Europe had in part recovered from the effects of the barbarian deluge which followed the downfall of Rome.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Try to picture what might have been the result for western civilization had the small and newly-developed democratic civilization of Greece been crushed by the Persians at the time they overran the Greek peninsula.

2. Do periods of great political, commercial, and intellectual expansion usually subject old systems of morality and education to severe strain? Illustrate.

3. Why was the change in the type of Athenian education during the Ephebic years a natural and even a necessary one for the new Athens?

4. Do you understand that the system of training before the Ephebic years was also seriously changed, or was the change largely a re-shaping and extension of the education of youths after sixteen?

5. Were the Sophists a good addition to the Athenian instructing force, or not? Why?

6. How may a State establish a corrective for such a flood of individualism as overwhelmed Greece, and still allow individual educational initiative and progress?