21. The Schools of Athens.—The Athenian legislator, Solon, had placed physical and intellectual training upon the same footing. Children, he said, ought, above everything else, to learn “to swim and to read.” It seems that the education of the body was the chief preoccupation of the Athenian republic. While the organization of schools for grammar and music was left to private enterprise, the State took a part in the direction of the gymnasia. The director of the gymnasium, or the gymnasiarch, was elected each year by the assembly of the people. Nevertheless, Athenian education became more and more a course in literary training, especially towards the sixth century B.C.
The Athenian child remained in the charge of a nurse and an attendant up to his sixth or seventh year. At the age of seven, a pedagogue, that is, a “conductor of children,” usually a slave, was charged with the oversight of the child. Conducted by his pedagogue, the pupil attended by turns the school for grammar, the palestra,[24] or school for gymnastics, and the school for music. The grammarian, who sometimes gave his lessons in the open air, in the streets and on the public squares, taught reading, writing, and mythology. Homer was the boy’s reading-book. Instruction in gymnastics was given in connection with instruction in grammar. It was begun in the palestra and continued in the gymnasium. Instruction in music succeeded the training in grammar and gymnastics. The music-master, or citharist, first taught his pupils to sing, and then to play upon the stringed instruments, the lyre and the cithara. We know what value the Athenians attributed to music. Plato and Aristotle agree in thinking that the rhythm and harmony of music inspire the soul with the love of order, with harmoniousness, regularity, and a soothing of the passions. We must recollect, moreover, that music held a large place in the actual life of the Greeks. The laws were promulgated in song. It was necessary to sing in order to fulfil one’s religious duties. It was held that the education of Themistocles had been neglected because he had not learned music. “We must regard the Greeks,” says Montesquieu, “as a race of athletes and fighters. Now those exercises, so proper to make men hardy and fierce, had need of being tempered by others which could soften the manners. Music, which affected the soul through the organs of the body, was exactly adapted to this purpose.”[25]
In the elementary schools of Athens, at least at the first, the current discipline was severe. Aristophanes, bewailing the degeneracy of his time, recalls in these terms the good order that reigned in the olden school:[26]—
“I will relate what was the ancient education in the happy time when I taught (it is Justice who speaks) and when modesty was the rule. Then the boys came out of each street with bare heads and feet, and, regardless of rain and snow, went together in the most perfect order towards the school for music. There they were seated quietly and modestly. They were not permitted to cross their legs, and they learned some good songs. The master sang the song for them slowly and with gravity. If some one took a notion to sing with soft and studied inflections, he was severely flogged.”
22. The Schools of Rhetoric and Philosophy.—Grammar, gymnastics, and music proper, represented the elementary instruction of the young Athenian. But this instruction was reserved for citizens in easy circumstances. The poor, according to the intentions of Solon, were to learn only reading, swimming, and a trade. The privilege of instruction became still more exclusive in the case of the schools of rhetoric and philosophy frequented by those of adult years.
It would be beside our purpose to speak in this place of the courses in literature, or to make known the methods of those teachers of rhetoric who taught eloquence to all who presented themselves for instruction, either in the public squares or in the gymnasia. The sophists, those itinerant philosophers who went from city to city offering courses at high rates of tuition, and teaching the art of speaking on every subject, and of making a plea for error and injustice just as skilfully as for justice and truth, at the same time made illustrious and disgraceful the teaching of eloquence.[27] The philosophers were more worthy of their task. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were illustrious professors of ethics. Socrates had no regular school, but he grouped about him distinguished young men and initiated them into learning and virtue. The Academy of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle were great schools of philosophy, real private universities, each directed by a single man. The teaching given in these schools has traversed the ages, and has been preserved in imperishable books. Moreover, those illustrious spirits of Greece have transmitted to us either methods or general ideas which the history of pedagogy should reverently collect, as the first serious efforts of human reflection on the art of education.
23. Socrates: the Socratic Method.—Socrates spent his life in teaching, and in teaching according to an original method, which has preserved his name. He had the genius of interrogation. To question all whom he met, either at the gymnasium or in the streets; to question the sophists in order to convince them of their errors and to confound their arrogance, and presumptuous young men in order to teach them the truth of which they were ignorant; to question great and small, statesmen and masons, now Pericles and now a shopkeeper; to question always and everywhere in order to compel every one to form clear ideas; such was the constant occupation and passion of his life. When he allowed himself to dream of the future life, he said smilingly that he hoped to continue in the Elysian Fields the habits of the Athenian Agora, and still to interrogate the shades of the mighty dead. With Socrates, conversation became an art, and the dialogue a method. He scarcely ever employed the didactic form, or that of direct teaching. He addressed himself to his interlocutor, urged him to set forth his ideas, harassed him with questions often somewhat subtile, skilfully led him to recognize the truth which he himself had in mind, or the rather permitted him to go off on a false route in order finally to discover to him his error and to sport with his confusion; and all this with an art of wonderful analysis, with a subtilty of reasoning pushed almost to an extreme, and also with a great simplicity of language, and with examples borrowed from common life, such as we are accustomed to call intuitive examples.
24. The Socratic Irony.—To form an intelligible account of the Socratic method, it is necessary to distinguish its two essential phases. Socrates followed a double method and sought a double end.
In the first case, he wished to make war against error and to refute false opinions. Then he resorted to what has been called the Socratic irony.[28] He raised a question as one who simply desired to be instructed. If there was the statement of an error in the reply of the respondent, Socrates made no objection to it, but pretended to espouse the ideas and sentiments of his interlocutor. Then, by questions which were adroit and sometimes insidious, he forced him to develop his opinions, and to display, so to speak, the whole extent of his folly, and the next instant slyly brought him face to face with the consequences, which were so absurd and contradictory that he ended in losing confidence, in becoming involved in his conclusions, and finally in making confession of his errors.
25. Maieutics, or the Art of giving Birth to Ideas.—Analogous processes constituted the other part of the Socratic method, that which he himself called maieutics, or the art of giving birth to ideas.