7. In Persia, the State appears for the first time as a distinct agency in promoting education.
8. In China, from time immemorial, scholarship has been made the condition for obtaining places in the civil service, and in consequence education has been made subordinate to examinations.
9. Save to a limited extent among the Jews, woman was debarred from the privileges of education.
10. In the main, education was administered so as to perpetuate class distinctions. There was no appearance of the conception that education is a universal right and a universal good.]
FOOTNOTES:
[6] A knowledge of the mental and moral condition of savages serves the invaluable purpose of showing what education has accomplished for the human race. There would be much less grumbling at the tax-gatherer if men could clearly conceive the condition of societies where no taxes are levied. To know what education has actually done we need to know the condition of societies unaffected by systematic education. Such a book as Lubbock’s Origin of Civilization is a helpful introduction to the history of education. Whoever reads such a book carefully will be confronted with this problem: How is it that intellectual inertness, amounting almost to stupidity, is frequently the concomitant of an acute and persistent sense-training? Besides, savage tribes are historical illustrations of what has been produced on a large scale by “following Nature.” (P.)
[7] There is an argument for caste in the modern fiction of a “beautiful economy of Nature,” which plants human beings in society as it does trees in the earth, and thus makes education consist in the action of environment upon man and in the reaction of man upon his environment. To support existence, man needs certain endowments; but the force of circumstances creates these very endowments. One man is predestined to be a Red Indian, another a Bushman, and still another an accountant; and in each case the function of education is to adapt the man to the place where Nature has fixed him. This modern justification of caste is adroitly worked out by Mr. Spencer in the first chapter of his Education. (P.)
[8] Dittes, Histoire de l’éducation et de l’instruction, translated by Redolfi, 1880, p. 38.
[9] Burnouf, Introduction à l’histoire du Bouddhisme, p. 252.
[10] Dittes, p. 49.