An Introduction to the History of Educational Theories (Routledge Revivals)

Oscar Browning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415746243
• eBook ISBN: 9781317752387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

An Introduction to the History of Educational Theories, first published in 1881, offers a comprehensive overview of the most notable approaches to education throughout Western history, from Athens and Rome to the Victorian public school. Exploring not only the still famous theories of Plato and Aristotle, this work also touches on techniques in education which are either no longer prevalent – Roman Oratory, the Jesuits – or in some cases were never widely adopted or appreciated: John Milton, for example. This title will be of value to those intrigued by the potential of past attitudes for present-day application, as well as to those unconvinced by contemporary approaches.

1 Education among the Greeks—Music and Gymnastic Theories of Plato and Aristotle.¹

¹ In this chapter I have been under special obligations to Professor A. S. Wilkins’s Essay on National Education in Greece: London, 1873, and to Mr. Nettleship’s article on ‘The Theory of Education in the Republic of Plato,’ contained in Hellenica: Rivingtons, 1880.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315797052-1

HISTORY of EDUCATIONAL THEORIES.

To those who begin the study of the historical development of educational theories some preliminary caution is necessary. We shall find that education has always been a favourite problem with philosophers. Those who have wished to reform or to reorganise the world, meeting with many difficulties in dealing with the mass of grown-up people, have turned their eyes to the more hopeful body of ingenuous youth, whose minds are like white paper or pliant wax. If only the rising generation can be directed in the proper path, the regeneration of the human race will be a reality instead of a dream. Experience ought by this time to have taught us that these hopes are misleading. From one point of view education can do much, from another it can do little or nothing. A child is born into the world with its faculties given to it once for all No power can be put into it which is not there already. Its parents and a long line of ancestors have determined of what nature it shall be. As it grows up, and we fancy that we can fathom its capabilities and gauge its strength, we forget the countless capacities which lie hidden in the simple germ. The diseases and the eccentricities of our ancestors lie in wait for us at every new epoch of our lives. We pass as it were down the vista of a spectral avenue in which our forefathers stand, ranged in counter lines, ready at the proper moment to lay their chilly hand on their descendant. Each year of life beats and moulds the boy into the likeness of his fathers.

Again, youth cannot be everything which it promises to be. A choice must be made. A large part of the fascination of boyhood lies in the uncertainty of its future. A teacher is apt to think that his bright pupil may be anything. He shows germs of qualities, any one of which—all of which—he imagines may come to fruit. Yet it is not so. Distinction in one direction can only be obtained by repression in another. A strong nature can only be produced by lopping and pruning the branches which it sends out on all sides into the circumambient air. The human powers are limited. The brain has only a definite capacity, and to work well it must be charged with blood. The quantity of blood is limited, and cannot be drawn to the brain without being taken from some other part the stomach or the limbs. Emotion, it is true, may be transformed into intellect, the force of passion may be absorbed by the growing will; but the physical basis on which the senses, the intellect, the will, and the emotions rest is but a limited quantity for each individual.

To the teacher who has assimilated these important truths there remains yet another difficulty, arising from the struggle of man with his environment. The teacher does his best to develop harmoniously all the faculties of the individual, to create a sound body for the sound mind, to take care that all the fibres of the brain are called into play and roused to full activity, and that their work is properly distributed among the inherited capacities of the pupil. He will consider his object gained if his pupil has attained to the best development of which he is capable, if no powers have been repressed excepting so far as is necessary for the proper activity of others. But suppose that this result has been produced, and no teacher can boast that he has as yet completely produced it, what assurance has he that these qualities will be required by the world? That moves on its way heedless of individual exceptions. The perfectly educated man may find no place for himself in the economy of things. If we murmur at this the world replies, ‘The fault is with you; with all your science you cannot educate as I educate.’ Consider the new industries of the last fifty years, what necessities have been created by railways and telegraphs! The skill of a pointsman, an engine-driver, or a telegraphist requires qualities and knowledge which probably did not exist before the present century. They have been produced by no school, taught by no masters. As Persius says, the belly was their teacher, the necessity of making a livelihood formed them into these moulds. So, then, we have this antagonism between the individual and the world. The individual requires something for the full satisfaction of his being; the world requires something else, and will have it. What are we to do? Are we to give the highest education possible irrespective of practical needs, or are we to give up education altogether, and let the world do what it will with its own? This is the first great problem which meets us at the threshold of the subject.

Savage tribes solve the question by adopting, uncompromisingly, the practical view. An Australian or a Zulu is trained for the immediate ends of existence. To be a keen hunter or a successful warrior is the first necessity of his life, and tradition has built up a scheme of education to suit these ends. We will pass over the earlier forms of education—the Chinese, the Indian, the Egyptian, and the Jewish. Little is known about any of them except the Jewish, not enough to make them practically valuable to ourselves. On the other hand the principles of Greek education cannot be omitted. The Greeks were the first to teach education as a science; the results which they produced were admirable. We have a full account both of their ordinary practice and of the ideal schemes sketched by Plato and Aristotle; while their system of education is exercising a considerable effect upon the world at the present day. We cannot understand the history of education since the Renaissance unless we make ourselves acquainted with the Greek and Roman traditions which so profoundly affected Europe at the revival of learning.

Until the time of Alexander the main subjects of education among the Greeks were music and gymnastics, that is, bodily training and mental culture, music (μουσική) or the science of the muses, being divided into the preliminary training of grammar, and music properly so called. At a late period more subjects were introduced, and that series of studies came into use which was known as ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία, or ‘encyclopædia,’ ‘orbis doctrinæ,’ as Seneca calls it. This was composed of the seven arts: grammar, rhetoric, philosophy or dialectic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy, which, continuing through the Roman period, lasted under the name of Trivium and Quadrivium until the close of the Middle Ages. Not much was taught until the child reached the seventh year, and the earliest teaching was by myths. The Greek day began very early, indeed with sunrise; it was interrupted between ten and twelve by the business of the market-place, and the remaining hours were spoken of as afternoon and evening. Boys went to school in the early morning, and a second time after breakfast. They were accompanied through the streets by the παιδαγωγός, a faithful slave who had charge of their moral supervision. The literary teaching was followed by athletics, the palæstra by the bath. Six hours a day was regarded both by Greeks and Romans as the proper limit of study. There were occasional holidays, and the hot time of the year was given up to vacation as is still the practice in many countries.

The first duty of a Greek boy was to learn his letters. This was coincident with learning to swim, so that ‘one who knows neither swimming nor his letters’ was the Greek term for an ignoramus. The methods of teaching were very similar to our own; there was the same difficulty of giving the letters a name differing from their power in sound, the same attempts at shortening labour and making learning easy and without tears. The sophists invented methods of compendious instruction, and the alphabetical tragedy of Callias, which has sometimes been regarded as a satire upon them, is more probably an attempt to teach letters in play. A Greek child had undoubtedly an advantage over us in school books; we have nothing to compare with the grace, beauty, and fun of the Odyssee. Full of charm as it is to an English boy or girl, it must have been far more so to those who breathed the same pure air and gazed on the same blue sea as its hero and its author. Reading was taught with the greatest pains, the utmost care was taken with the intonation of the voice, and the articulation of the throat. We have lost the power of distinguishing between accent and quantity. The Greeks did not acquire it without long and anxious training of the ear and the vocal organs. This was the duty of the phonascus. Homer was the common study of all Greeks. The Iliad and Odyssee were at once the Bible, the Shakespeare, the Robinson Crusoe, and the Arabian Nights of the Hellenic race. Long passages and indeed whole books were learnt by heart. The Greek, as a rule, learnt no language but his own. Next to reading and repetition came writing, which was carefully taught. Composition naturally followed, and the burden of correcting exercises, which still weighs down the backs of schoolmasters, dates from these early times. Closely connected with reading and writing is the art of reckoning, and the science of numbers leads us easily to music. Plato considered arithmetic as the best spur to a sleepy and uninstructed spirit; we see from the Platonic dialogues how mathematical problems employed the mind and thoughts of young Athenians. Many of the more difficult arithmetical operations were solved by geometrical methods, but the Greeks carried the art of teaching numbers to considerable refinement. They used the abacus, and had an elaborate method of finger reckoning, which was serviceable up to 10,000. Drawing was the crowning accomplishment to this vestibule of training.

By the time the fourteenth year was completed, the Greek boy would have begun to devote himself seriously to the practice of athletics. The ardour shown in their pursuit by the Greeks and Romans is often used as an argument for our exaggerated devotion to them at the present day. There is no doubt that by this double attention to the welfare of mind and body, the Greeks became the most beautiful as well as the most gifted of mankind. But it is a question whether in our modern race after cups and colours we are following the Greeks at all, and not rather the factions of the Roman circus and the corruption of the lower Empire. Much as the Greeks prized athletic distinction, they held professional athletes in very little honour. They would have regarded with contempt a gentleman who thought it a desirable object in life to be a prize-fighter, a gamekeeper, or a coachman. The antagonism between work and games was a practical difficulty to them as it is to us. It was indeed in the palæstra that Socrates found his readiest hearers and dispensed his abstrusest lore. Can we imagine a dialogue such as the Theætetus being held in an English cricket ground, with the players waiting for their innings? But Euripides denounces the race of athletes in strong language, and there are other signs that in his time the danger of their excessive cultivation was being recognised. The enthusiasm shown by Homer and Pindar for bodily strength had become weaker in the days of Pericles. The Greeks did not think, as we are apt to do, that athletics are the best guarantee for manliness of character and the best safeguard against effeminacy. They knew that the mind and body cannot be profitably exercised at the same time, and that the mind and not the body is the seat of the higher aspirations. The Spartans, whose name has become proverbial for hardiness, were regarded by the Athenians as brutalised by their training.

As gymnastics were intended to harmonise the powers of the body, so music was to order and to regulate the soul. It is difficult to understand what the Greeks meant by music. If we could fully realise this we should have made their system of education as clear to us as our own. In one sense music is equivalent to culture, to the whole range of studies which soften and refine the mind and character. In another sense it is undoubtedly the same as what we mean by music. Greek music differed from our own in not being polyphonic. The Greeks would not have understood or have appreciated the various instruments and the mingled effects of an orchestra. They were accustomed to hear only one instrument at a time, or at the most an instrument accompanying the voice. But, on the other hand, the Greek had a clearer perception of the divisions of the scale. A Greek who could not distinguish between semi-tones, or even between quarter-tones, would have been thought as ignorant as a classical scholar who quoted Homer with a false quantity. Also they were rar more sensitive than laymen usually are amongst ourselves to the essential characteristics of different keys. We have abundant evidence that every Greek boy was carefully trained in the theory and practice of the musical art, and that it was regarded by masters of all schools as of the first importance to intellect and morality. Plato, Aristotle, and Aristophanes agree in this. Music was not only the gymnastic of the ear and the voice, but of the spirit, and the foundation of all the higher life. Its rhythm and harmony penetrated into the soul and worked powerfully upon it. In union with poetry it led the soul to virtue and inspired it with courage. It has been well said that if a Greek youth had by continuous practice become stronger than a bull, more truthful than the Godhead, and wiser than the most learned Egyptian priest, his fellow-citizens would shrug their shoulders at him with contempt if he did not possess what a series of music and gymnastic can alone give—a sense of gracefulness and proportion.

This careful musical training might have been expected by a Greek to do that service for the mind which in later days has been attributed with much less reason to accurate scholarship. The development of a sense of harmony, the using of the mind to decide on subtle questions by the delicate judgment of taste rather than by the coarser balances of reason and argument—all this might be expected to proceed from the nice appreciation of the character of sounds, and of the ethical effect of melodies. Plato in his ‘Republic’ defends the power of music, ‘because rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, bearing grace in their movements, and making the soul graceful of him who is rightly educated, or ungraceful if ill-educated; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art or nature, and with a true taste, while he praises, and rejoices over, and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason of the thing; and when reason comes he will recognise and salute her as a friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.’ (‘Rep.’ iii. 401–2, Jowett’s Translation.) Nothing shows the importance which the Greeks attached to music more than their strong condemnation of the flute as compared with the lyre. The one was the basis of true wisdom and morality, the other the instrument of general laxity and corruption. It would be difficult for the most ardent defender of classics to condemn in stronger language the shallowness and superficiality of ‘modern sides.’ The influence of music was developed still further by the practice of singing and dancing.

Bearing in mind these general principles of Greek education, it will be more easy for us to follow the training which Plato prescribes for his ideal State. According to him education is nurture (τροφή). It is very powerful, it can determine whether a nature shall be wild and malevolent, or rich with benefits to mankind. But it includes not merely instruction or training, but all the influences which are brought to bear upon the soul. We must approach the problem with a psychological analysis. The soul is made up of three parts: 1, the appetite (ἐπιθυμία), which is wild but capable of being tamed; 2, the spirit (θυμός), the element of courage, which may be enlisted on the side either of good or evil; 3, the philosophic element (νοῦς), the source of gentleness, of sociability, of love, of refinement, of culture, and of wisdom. Now the duty of education is to control the appetite, and so to balance the other elements of the soul that each may tend to the perfection of the other. If the philosophic side of the soul is too much encouraged its gentleness may become effeminacy, its sensitiveness irritability, its simple love be changed into feverish desire. On the other hand the exaggerated practice of athletics will swallow up the intellect, courage will become brutality, and high spirit insolence. The business of education is to reconcile these two elements in harmonious proportion.

Plato finds in the State the same elements that he discovers in the individual. The State was merely the citizen writ large. Philosophers represented the wisdom of the State, warriors its courage, the mob its passions, which were to be kept under due control. In the harmony of these various members lies justice, the goal and object of its constitution. All education is to be controlled by the State. Even marriages are to be directed by it. Children are to remain in the family till the end of the sixth year, but even then their nurture and direction is carefully prescribed. They are to be taught morality by myths and tales. Plato considers the cardinal virtues of conduct to be: honour to parents, love of fellow-citizens, courage, truthfulness, self-control;²and he evidently considers the education of character to be more important than the usual rudiments of technical education, reading, writing, and arithmetic. From the seventh year the child belongs to the State. Till the tenth year the training is to be principally in gymnastic, which is, however, to be continued through the whole life. From the tenth to the thirteenth year the child is taught to read and write; from the fourteenth to the sixteenth he learns poetry and music. Plato’s sense of the importance of music has been already mentioned, but we may here emphasise the close connection which he sees between it and the stability of order in the State. ‘The introduction of a new kind of music,’ he says, ‘must be shunned as imperilling the whole State, since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.’ ‘It is here in music that our guardians should erect their guard house, for it is here that lawlessness easily creeps in unawares, in the guise of amusement and professing to do no mischief. Gradually gaining a lodgment, it quietly insinuates itself into manners and customs. From thence it issues in greater force and makes its way into mutual compacts; from compacts it goes on to attack laws and constitutions, displaying the utmost impudence until it ends by overturning everything, both in public and in private.’ Plato wishes that the years from seventeen to twenty shall be devoted mainly to athletics as a preparation for the art of war. But he carefully distinguishes between the gymnastic training of the professional athlete and that of the free-born citizen. ‘The habit of body cultivated by trained fighters in the palæstra is a sleepy kind of regimen, and produces a precarious state of health. Do you not observe that men in regular training sleep their life away, and if they depart only slightly from the prescribed diet are attacked by serious maladies in their worst form? A better conceived regimen is required for our athletes of war, who must be wakeful like watch dogs, and possess the utmost quickness both of eye and ear; and who are so exposed when on service to variations in the water they drink, and in the rest of their food, also vicissitudes of sultry heats and wintry storms, that it will not do for them to be of precarious health. The best gymnastic will be sister to the music we described a little while ago, a simple moderate system, especially that assigned to our fighting men.’

² Hellenica, p. 97.

At the age of twenty, men are to be chosen for their different employments; the next ten years they are to devote to the study of the sciences coupled with military service, and the formation of the character by practical life; the following five years are to be entirely devoted to dialectic. Of this it is difficult to give an account without going more deeply into the Platonic philosophy than would suit our purpose. ‘It lies,’ Plato says, ‘like a coping stone upon the top of the sciences. It is the queen science which holds the key of all the rest. It carries back its hypotheses to the very first principle of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Font Chapter
• Font Chapter
• Dedication
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Font Chapter
• CHAPTER I. Education among the Greeks—Music and Gymnastic Theories of Plato and Aristotle
• CHAPTER II. Roman Education—Oratory
• CHAPTER III. Humanistic Education
• CHAPTER IV. The Realists—Ratke and Comenius
• CHAPTER V. The Naturalists—Rabelais and Montaigne
• CHAPTER VI. English Humanists and Realists—Roger Ascham and John Milton
• CHAPTER VII. Locke
• CHAPTER VIII. Jesuits and Jansenists
• CHAPTER IX. Rousseau
• CHAPTER X. Pestalozzi
• CHAPTER XI. Kant, Fichte, and Herbart
• CHAPTER XII. The English Public School