In all ages the claims of the individual and those of the community have struggled for the mastery as the ultimate principles of life. As one or the other has prevailed the conception of education has emphasized social service or individual success as the primary end. The true harmony of human life will only be attained when these two impulses, contradictory on their own level, are united in a higher synthesis which sees each as the complement of the other in a life whose purpose is neither simple egoism nor pure altruism. Until that conception of life is attained and held generally there can be no sure and universally accepted conception of the aim and function of education. Much of the interest of the history of education[1] turns on the relation of these two principles as determinants of its aim.
In ancient Greece the supremacy of the state was generally unquestioned, and, especially in the earlier times, the good man was identified with the good citizen. No doubt, in later days philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, Old Greek education. saw clearly that the round of the duties of citizenship did not exhaust the life of the individual. With them the highest life was one of cultured leisure in which the energies were mainly concentrated on the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. But this “diagogic” life was only for the select few; for the undistinguished many the fulfilment by each of the duties of his station remained the measure of worthy life, though such duties were regarded as affecting the individual and private relations of the citizens in a much more intimate way than in former and ruder ages. And for those who devoted their lives to the highest culture, the essential preliminary condition was the existence of such a state as would form the most favourable environment for their pursuits and the most stable foundation for their leisured life. Thus Greek thought was saturated with the conception of life as essentially a set of relations between the individual and the city-state of which he formed an integral part. The first aim of education was therefore to train the young as citizens.
This training must, of necessity, be of a specific kind; for, like other small communities, the Greek city-states showed a life fundamentally one in conception, under various specific forms. Each state had its special character, and to this character the education given in it must conform if it were to be an effective instrument for training the citizens. From these fundamental conceptions flowed the demands of Plato and Aristotle that education should be regulated in all its details by the state authority, should be compulsory on all free citizens, and should be uniform—at any rate in its earlier stages—for all. In the Republic and the Laws, Plato shows to what extreme lengths theory may go when it neglects to take account of some of the most pertinent facts of life. For the guardian-citizens of the ideal state family life and family ties are abolished; no lower community is to be allowed to enter into competition with the state. Aristotle, indeed, did not go to these extreme lengths; he allowed the family to remain, but he seems to have regarded it as likely to affect children more for evil than for good.
In the essential principles laid down by both philosophers as to the relation of the state to education, and in the corollaries they drew from that relation, they were not at variance with the accepted Greek theory on the subject. It is true that the actual practice of Greek states departed, and often widely, from this ideal, for, especially in later centuries, the Greek always tended to live his own life. The nearest approach to the theory was found in Sparta, where the end of the state as a military organization was kept steadily in view, and where, after early childhood, the young citizens were trained directly by the state in a kind of barrack life—the boys to become warriors, the girls the mothers of warriors. It was this feature of Spartan education, together with the rude simplicity of life it enforced, which attracted Plato, and, to a less extent, Aristotle. In Athens there had of old been state laws insisting on the attendance of the children of the free citizens at school, and, in some degree, regulating the schools themselves. But at the time of Plato these had fallen into desuetude, and the state directly concerned itself only with the training of the ephebi, for which, we learn from Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, somewhat elaborate provisions were made by the appointment of officers, and the regulation of both intellectual and physical pursuits. For children and youths under the ephebic age there was no practical regulation of schools or palaestra by the state. Yet there is no doubt that the education really given was in conformity with Athenian ideals of culture and life, and that it was generally received by the children of free citizens, though of course the sons of the wealthy, then as now, could and did continue their attendance at school to a later age than their poorer brethren. The education of girls was essentially a domestic training. What Plato and Aristotle, with the theorist’s love of official systematic regulation, regarded as the greatest defect of Athenian education was in reality its strongest point. In practice, the harmony between individual liberty and social claims was much more nearly attained under a system of free working out of common thoughts and ideals than would have been the case under one of the irresistible imposition from without of a rigid mould.
The instruments of education everywhere found to be in harmony with the Greek conception of life and culture were essentially twofold,—“music” (μουσική), or literary and artistic culture, for the mind, and systematic gymnastic (γυμναστική) for the body. Plato, in the Republic, shows that the latter, as well as the former, affects the character, and doubtless, though not formulated, this was generally more or less vaguely felt. But Greek gymnastic was really an individual training, and therefore made only indirectly for the aim of cultivating the social bonds of citizenship. Ancient Greece had nothing corresponding in value in this respect to the organized games which form so important a feature in the school life of modern England. The “musical” training was essentially in the national literature and music of Greece, and this could obviously be carried to very different lengths. The elements of mathematical science were also commonly taught. The essential purpose throughout was the development of the character of a loyal citizen of Athens. As Athenian culture advanced, increasing attention was paid to diagogic studies, especially in the ephebic age, with a corresponding decrease of attention to merely physical pursuits; hence the complaints of such satirists as Aristophanes of a growing luxury, effeminacy and corruption of youths: complaints apparently based on a comparison of the worst features of the actual present with an idealized and imaginative picture of the virtues of the past. Such comparison is, indeed, implicit in much of Plato and Aristotle as well as in Aristophanes.
But a disintegrating force was already at work in the educational system of Greece which Plato and Aristotle vainly opposed. This was the rhetorical training of the Sophists, the narrowly practical and individualistic aim of which was entirely out of harmony with the older Greek ideals of life and culture. In a democratic city-state the orator easily became a demagogue, and generally oratory was the readiest path to influence and power. Thus oratory opened the way to personal ambition, and young men who were moved by that passion eagerly attended the Sophist schools where their dominant motive was strengthened.
Further, the closer relations between the Greek states, both in nearer and farther Hellas, led naturally to the diminution of differences between civic ideals, and, as a consequence, to a more cosmopolitan conception of higher education. This process was completed by the loss of political independence of the city-states under the Macedonian domination. Henceforth, higher education became purely intellectual, and its relation to political and social life increasingly remote. This, combined with the growing rhetorical tendency already noticed, accounts for the sterility of Greek thought during the succeeding centuries. The means of higher education were, indeed, more fully organized. The university of Athens was the outcome of a fusion of the private philosophical schools with the state organization for the training of the ephebi, and there were other such centres of higher culture, especially in after years at Alexandria, where the contact of Greek thought with the religions and philosophies of Egypt and the East gave birth in time to the more or less mystical philosophies which culminated in Neo-platonism. But at Athens itself thought became more and more sterile, and education more and more a mere training in unreal rhetoric, till the dissolution of the university by Justinian in A.D. 529.
Thus when Rome conquered Greece, Greek education had lost that reality which is drawn from intimate relation to civic life, and the fashionable individualistic schools of philosophy could do nothing to replace the loss. It was, then, an Old Roman education. education which had largely lost its life-springs that was transferred to Rome. In the earlier centuries of the republic, Roman education was given entirely in family and public life. The father had unlimited power over his son’s life, and was open to public censure if he failed to train him in the ordinary moral, civic and religious duties. But it is doubtful if there were any schools (q.v.), and it is certain there was no national literature to furnish an instrument of culture. A Roman boy learnt to reverence the gods, to read, to bear himself well in manly exercises, and to know enough of the laws of his country to regulate his conduct. This last he acquired directly by hearing his father decide the cases of his clients every morning in his hall. The rules of courtesy he learnt similarly by accompanying his father to the social gatherings to which he was invited. Thus early Roman education was essentially practical, civic and moral, but its intellectual outlook was extremely narrow.
When a wider culture was imported from Greece it was, however, the form rather than the spirit of true Hellenic education that was transferred. This was, indeed, to some extent inevitable from the decadent state of Greek Hellenized Roman education. education at the time, but it was accentuated by the essentially practical character of the Roman mind. The instrument of education first introduced was Greek literature, much of which was soon translated into Latin. In time the schools of the grammatici, teaching grammar and literature, were supplemented by schools of rhetoric and philosophy, though the philosophy taught in them was itself little more than rhetorical declamation. These furnished the means of higher culture for those youths who did not study at Alexandria or Athens, and were also preparatory to studies at those universities. Under the Empire the rhetorical schools were gradually organized into a state system, the general principles of administration being laid down by imperial decree, and even such details as the appointment and rate of payment of the professors, at first left to the municipalities, being in time assumed by the central government. There is no evidence of any state regulation or support of the lower schools. This widening of culture affected both boys and girls, the domestic education of the latter being supplemented by a study of literature. But it is the higher training in rhetoric which is especially characteristic of Hellenized Roman education.
The conception of a rhetorical culture is seen at its best in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, the most systematic treatise on education produced by the ancient world. With Quintilian the ideal of an orator was a widely cultured, wise and honourable man. And at first the teaching of rhetoric undoubtedly made for higher and true culture. But with the autocracy, soon passing into tyranny, of the empire, rhetoric ceased to be a preparation for real life. The true function of oratory is to persuade a free people. When it cannot be applied to this purpose it becomes little more than a means of intellectual frivolity, or, at the best, an exhibition of cultured ingenuity. Under the empire a rhetorical training was, indeed, turned in not a few instances to practical but most unworthy uses by the delators; a result made possible by the legal system which rewarded delation with a considerable portion of the estate of the condemned. Even apart from this, the education in rhetoric had an increasingly evil effect both on the culture and on the character of the higher classes in the Roman empire. Out of real connexion with life as it was, it sought its subjects in the realms of the fanciful and the trivial, and with unreality of topic went of necessity deterioration of style. The vivid presentment of living thought gave way to that inflated and bombastic abuse of meretricious ornament and far-fetched metaphor in which human speech is always involved when it sets forth ideas, or shadows of ideas, which grow out of no conviction in the speaker and are expected to carry no conviction to the hearer. Imitation of the form of great models, without the substance of thought which underlay them, led to a general unreality and essential falseness of mental life. Further, the continual gazing with admiration on the productions of the past, and the conception of excellence as consisting in closeness of imitation, induced a servile attitude of mind towards authority in all too close agreement with the political servility which marked the Roman court. Such an attitude was essentially hostile to mental initiative, and thus rhetoric became not merely an art of expression but a type of character.