His pedagogy may be briefly outlined as follows:—
1. Education is a lifelong task, beginning at birth and continuing till death. The first seven years are to be spent in the home under the fostering care of the parents. During this period the child is to have no severe tasks, but chief attention is to be given to physical development. He must learn obedience, as the first step to an ethical life. His food and clothing are to be simple, and his toys and games of a character to stimulate wholesome activity. At the age of seven he is to enter upon the direct intellectual training, and nothing must interfere with this during the next seven years. From fourteen to twenty-one the education is to include such exercises as directly prepare for life. The diet is to be simple, the physical training severe, for the double purpose of counteracting the tendencies of the adolescent period, and of preparing for war.
2. Education includes the development of the body, the character, and the intellect. Courage, endurance, self-denial, temperance, truthfulness, and justice are essential characteristics to be sought. The purpose of instruction is to develop the imperfect, untrained child into the well-rounded, intelligent, and patriotic citizen.
3. The course of study, which begins seriously after the seventh year, includes music, gymnastics, drawing, grammar, rhetoric, and mathematics. Later, dialectics, philosophy, and political science are to be added.
4. Woman is to have part in education that she may properly train her children, and may, by an intelligent understanding of the laws, uphold the State.
5. Aristotle considered education as the most important and most difficult of all problems. He based his pedagogy upon a knowledge of the individual.
6. His method was the analytical. He began with things and advanced from the concrete to the abstract.
The foregoing will show that Aristotle began the study of problems that still occupy the minds of educational thinkers, after more than twenty-two centuries of search for the truth. Some of the problems he discussed have found their solution, and the seed sown by the great thinker has come to fruitage. Karl Schmidt says, "Aristotle is the intellectual Alexander. Rich in experience and profound in speculation, he penetrates all parts of the universe and seeks to reduce all realities to concepts. He is the most profound and comprehensive thinker of the pre-Christian world,—the Hegel of classical antiquity,—because, like Hegel, he seeks to unify all knowledge, brings together the scattered materials of the present into one system, constructs in a wonderful intellectual temple the psychical and physical Cosmos, the universe and God, proclaims the destruction of an earlier culture epoch, and sets in motion waves in the ocean of history that are destined to influence the intellectual life of all centuries to come.... Aristotle stands for the highest intellectual summit of antiquity,—the bridge which binds the Grecian to the modern world,—the philosophical mouthpiece and the intellectual master of twenty centuries."
FOOTNOTES:
[17] Brother Azarias, "Essays Philosophical."