19. Greek Pedagogy.—Upon that privileged soil of Greece, in that brilliant Athens abounding in artists, poets, historians, and philosophers, in that rude Sparta celebrated for its discipline and manly virtues, education was rather the spontaneous fruit of nature, the natural product of diverse manners, characters, and races, than the premeditated result of a reflective movement of the human will. Greece, however, had its pedagogy, because it had its legislators and its philosophers, the first directing education in its practical details, the second making theoretical inquiries into the essential principles underlying the development of the human soul. In respect of education, as of everything else, the higher spiritual life of modern nations has been developed under the influence of Grecian antiquity.[22]

20. Athenian and Spartan Education.—In the spectacle presented to us by ancient Greece, the first fact that strikes us by its contrast with the immobility and unity of the primitive societies of the East, is a freer unfolding of the human faculties, and consequently a diversity in tendencies and manners. Doubtless, in the Greek republics, the individual is always subordinate to the State. Even in Athens, little regard is paid to the essential dignity of the human person. But the Athenian State differs profoundly from the Spartan, and consequently the individual life is differently understood and differently directed in these two great cities. At Athens, while not neglecting the body, the chief preoccupation is the training of the mind; intellectual culture is pushed to an extreme, even to over-refinement; there is such a taste for fine speaking that it develops an abuse of language and reasoning which merits the disreputable name of sophistry. At Sparta, mind is sacrificed to body; physical strength and military skill are the qualities most desired; the sole care is the training of athletes and soldiers. Sobriety and courage are the results of this one-sided education, but so are ignorance and brutality. Montaigne has thrown into relief, not without some partiality for Sparta, these two contrasted plans of education.

“Men went to the other cities of Greece,” he says, “to find rhetoricians, painters, and musicians, but to LacedÆmon for legislators, magistrates, and captains; at Athens fine speaking was taught; but here, brave acting; there, one learned to unravel a sophistical argument and to abate the imposture of insidiously twisted words; here, to extricate one’s self from the enticements of pleasure and to overcome the menaces of fortune and death by a manly courage. The Athenians busied themselves with words, but the Spartans with things; with the former, there was a continual activity of the tongue; with the latter, a continual activity of the soul.”[23]

The last remark is not just. The daily exercises of the young Spartans,—jumping, running, wrestling, playing with lances and at quoits,—could not be regarded as intellectual occupations. On the other hand, in learning to talk, the young Athenians learned also to feel and to think.

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.

Socrates was convinced that the human mind in its normal condition discovers certain truths through its own energies, provided one knows how to lead it and stimulate it; and so he here appealed to the spontaneity of his auditor, to his innate powers, and thus gently led him on his way by easy transitions to the opinion which he wished to make him admit. However, he applied this method only to the search for truths which could either be suggested by the intuitions of reason and common sense, or determined by a natural induction, that is, psychological, ethical, and religious truths.[29]

26. Examples of Irony and Maieutics.—We can best give an exact idea of the Socratic method by means of examples. These examples are to be found in the writings of the disciples of Socrates, as in the Dialogues of Plato, such as the Gorgias, the Euthydemus, etc., and still better in the Memorabilia of Xenophon, where the thought of the master and his manner of teaching are more faithfully reproduced than in the bold and original compositions of Plato. While recognizing the insufficiency of these extracts, we shall here make two quotations, in which is displayed either his incisive, critical spirit, or his suggestive and fruitful method: “The thirty tyrants had put many of the most distinguished citizens to death, and had encouraged others to acts of injustice. ‘It would surprise me,’ said Socrates one day, ‘if the keeper of a flock, who had killed one part of it and had made the other part poor, would not confess that he was a bad herdsman; but it would surprise me still more if a man standing at the head of his fellow-citizens should destroy a part of them and corrupt the rest, and were not to blush at his conduct and confess himself a bad magistrate.’ This remark having come to the ears of the Thirty, Critias and Charicles sent for Socrates, showed him the law, and forbade him to hold conversation with the young.

“Socrates inquired of them if he might be permitted to ask questions touching what might seem obscure to him in this prohibition. Upon their granting this permission: ‘I am prepared,’ he said, ‘to obey the laws, but that I may not violate them through ignorance, I would have you clearly inform me whether you interdict the art of speaking because it belongs to the number of things which are good, or because it belongs to the number of things which are bad. In the first case, one ought henceforth to abstain from speaking what is good; in the second, it is clear that the effort should be to speak what is right.’

“Thereupon Charicles became angry, and said: ‘Since you do not understand us, we will give you something easier to comprehend: we forbid you absolutely to hold conversation with the young.’ ‘In order that it may be clearly seen,’ said Socrates, ‘whether I depart from what is enjoined, tell me at what age a youth becomes a man.’ ‘At the time when he is eligible to the senate, for he has not acquired prudence till then; so do not speak to young men who are below the age of thirty.’

“‘But if I wish to buy something of a merchant who is below the age of thirty, may I ask him at what price he sells it?’

“‘Certainly you may ask such a question; but you are accustomed to raise inquiries about multitudes of things which are perfectly well known to you; it is this which is forbidden.’

“‘So I must not reply to a young man who asks me where Charicles lives, or where Critias is.’ ‘You may reply to such questions,’ said Charicles. ‘But recollect, Socrates,’ added Critias, ‘you must let alone the shoemakers, and smiths, and other artisans, for I think they must already be very much worn out by being so often in your mouth.’

“‘I must, therefore,’ said Socrates, ‘forego the illustrations I draw from these occupations relative to justice, piety, and all the virtues.’”[30]

In the final passage of this cutting dialogue, observe the elevation of tone and the gravity of thought. So Socrates had marvellous skill in allying enthusiasm with irony.

Here is an extract in which Socrates applies the maieutic art to the establishment of a moral truth, the belief in God:

“I will mention a conversation he once had in my presence with Aristodemus, surnamed the Little, concerning the gods. He knew that Aristodemus neither sacrificed to the gods, nor consulted the oracles, but ridiculed those who took part in these religious observances. ‘Tell me, Aristodemus,’ said he, ‘are there men whose talents you admire?’ ‘There are,’ he replied. ‘Then tell us their names,’ said Socrates. ‘In epic poetry I especially admire Homer; in dithyrambic, Melanippides; in tragedy, Sophocles; in statuary, Polycletus; in painting, Zeuxis.’ ‘But what artists do you think most worthy of admiration, those who form images destitute of sense and movement, or those who produce animated beings, endowed with the faculty of thinking and acting?’ ‘Those who form animated beings, for these are the work of intelligence and not of chance.’ ‘And which do you regard as the creation of intelligence, and which the product of chance, those works whose purpose cannot be recognized, or those whose utility is manifest?’ ‘It is reasonable to attribute to an intelligence the works which have some useful purpose.’”[31]

Socrates then points out to Aristodemus how admirably the different organs of the human body are adapted to the functions of life and to the use of man. And so proceeding from example to example, from induction to induction, always keeping the mind of his auditor alert by the questions he raises, and the answers that he suggests, forcing him to do his share of the work, and giving him an equal share in the train of reasoning, he finally brings him to the goal which is to make him recognize the existence of God.

27. The Republic of Plato.—“Would you form,” said J. J. Rousseau, “an idea of public education? read the Republic of Plato. It is the finest treatise on education ever written.” For truth’s sake we must discount the enthusiasm of Rousseau. The Republic doubtless contains some elements of a wise and practical scheme of education; but, on the whole, it is but an ideal creation, a compound of paradoxes and chimeras. In Plato’s ideal commonwealth, the individual and the family itself are sacrificed to the State. Woman becomes so much like man as to be subjected to the same gymnastic exercises; she too must be a soldier as he is. Children know neither father nor mother. From the day of their birth they are given in charge of common nurses, veritable public functionaries. In that common fold, “care shall be taken that no mother recognize her offspring.” We may guess that in making this pompous eulogy of the Republic, the paradoxical author of the Émile hoped to prepare the reader for giving a complaisant welcome to his own dreams.

28. The Education of Warriors and Magistrates.—Plato, by some unexplained recollection of the social constitution of the Hindoos, established three castes in his ideal State,—laborers and artisans, warriors, and magistrates. There was no education for laborers and artisans; it was sufficient for men of this caste to learn a trade. In politics, Plato is an aristocrat; he feels a disdain for the people, “that robust and indocile animal.” It should be observed, however, that the barriers which he set up between these three social orders are not insuperable. If a child of the inferior class gives evidence of exceptional qualities, he must be admitted to the superior class; and so if the son of a warrior or of a magistrate is notably incompetent and unworthy of his rank, he must suffer forfeiture, and become artisan or laborer.

As to the education which he designs for the warriors and the magistrates, Plato is minutely careful in regulating it. The education of the warriors comprises two parts,—music and gymnastics. The education of the magistrates consists of a training in philosophy of a high grade; they are initiated into all the sciences and into metaphysics. Plato’s statesmen must be, not priests, as in the East, but scholars and philosophers.

29. Music and Gymnastics.—Although Plato attaches a high value to gymnastics, he gives precedence to music. Before forming the body, Plato, the idealist, would form the soul, because it is the soul, according to him, which, by its own virtue, gives to the body all the perfection of which it is capable. Even in physical exercises, the purpose should be to give increased vigor to the soul: “In the training of the body, our young men shall aim, above everything else, at augmenting moral power.” Note this striking picture of the man who trains only his body: “Let a man apply himself to gymnastics, and become trained, and eat much, and wholly neglect music and philosophy, and at first his body will become strengthened; but if he does nothing else, and holds no converse with the Muses, though his soul have some natural inclination to learn, yet if it remains uncultivated by acquiring knowledge, by inquiry, by discourse, in a word, by some department of music, that is, by intellectual education, it will insensibly become weak, deaf, and blind. Like a wild beast, such a man will live in ignorance and rudeness, with neither grace nor politeness.” However, Plato is far from despising health and physical strength. On the contrary, it is a reproach to him that he has imposed on the citizens of his Republic the obligation of being physically sound, and of having excluded from it all those whose infirmities and feeble constitution condemn them to “drag out a dying life.” The right to live, in Plato’s city, as in the most of ancient societies, belonged only to men of robust health. The weak, the ailing, the wretched, all who are of infirm constitution,—Plato does not go so far as ordering such to be killed, but, what amounts almost to the same thing,—“they shall be exposed,” that is, left to die. The good of the State demands that every man be sacrificed whose health renders him unfit for civil duties. This cruel and implacable doctrine shocks us in the case of him whom Montaigne calls the divine Plato, and shocks us even more when we discover it among contemporary philosophers, whom the inspirations of Christian charity or the feeling of human fraternity should have preserved from such rank heartlessness. Is it not Herbert Spencer who blames modern societies for nourishing the diseased and assisting the infirm?

30. Religion and Art in Education.—Plato had formed a high ideal of the function of art in education, but this did not prevent him from being severe against certain forms of art, particularly comedy and tragedy, and poetry in general. He would have the poets expelled from the city and conducted to the frontier, though paying them homage with perfumes which will continue to be shed upon their heads, and with flowers with which they will ever be crowned. He admits no other poetry than that which reproduces the manners and discourse of a good man, and celebrates the brave deeds of the gods, or chants their glory. As a severe moralist and worshipper of the divine goodness, he condemns the poets of his time, either because they attribute to the divinity the vices and passions of men, or because they invest the imagination with base fears as they speak of Cocytus and the Styx, and portray a frightful hell and gods always mad with desire to persecute the human race. Elsewhere, in the Laws, Plato explains his conception of religion. He says that the religious books placed in the hands of children should be selected with as much care as the milk of a nurse. God is an infinite goodness who watches over men, and he should be honored, not by sacrifices and vain ceremonies, but by lives of justice and virtue.

For making men moral, Plato counts more upon art than upon religious feeling. To love letters, to hold converse with the Muses, to cultivate music and dancing, such, in the opinion of the noble spirits of Athens, is the natural route towards moral perfection. In their view, moral education is above all an education in art. The soul rises to the good through the beautiful. “Beautiful and good” (?a??? ?a? ??a???) are two words constantly associated in the speech of the Greeks. Even to-day we have much to learn from reflections like these: “We ought,” says Plato, “to seek out artists who by the power of genius can trace out the nature of the fair and the graceful, that our young men, dwelling, as it were, in a healthful region, may drink in good from every quarter, whence any emanation from noble works may strike upon their eye or their ear, like a gale wafting health from salubrious lands, and win them imperceptibly from their earliest years into resemblance, love, and harmony with the true beauty of reason.

“Is it not, then, on these accounts that we attach such supreme importance to a musical education, because rhythm and harmony sink most deeply into the recesses of the soul, bringing gracefulness in their train, and making a man graceful if he be rightly nurtured; but if not, the reverse? and also because he that has been duly nurtured therein will have the keenest eye for defects, whether in the failures of art, or in the misgrowths of nature; and feeling a most just disdain for them, will commend beautiful objects, and gladly receive them into his soul, and feed upon them, and grow to be noble and good; whereas he will rightly censure and hate all repulsive objects, even in his childhood, before he is able to be reasoned with; and when reason comes, he will welcome her most cordially who can recognize her by the instinct of relationship, and because he has been thus nurtured?”[32]

31. High Intellectual Education.—In the Republic of Plato the intellectual education of the warrior class remains exclusively literary and Æsthetic. In addition to this, the education of the ruling class is to be scientific and philosophic. The future magistrate, after having received the ordinary instruction up to the age of twenty, is to be initiated into the abstract sciences, mathematics, geometry, and astronomy. To this scientific education, which is to continue for ten years, there will succeed for five years the study of dialectics,[33] or philosophy, which develops the highest faculty of man, the reason, and teaches him to discover, through and beyond the fleeting appearances of the world of sense, the eternal verities and the essence of things. But Plato prolongs the education of his magistrates still further. After having given them the nurture of reason and intellectual insight, he sends them back to the cavern[34] at the age of thirty-five, that is, calls them back to public life, and makes them pass through all kinds of civil and military employments, until finally, at the age of fifty, in possession of all the endowments assured by consummate experience superadded to profound knowledge, they are fitted to be charged with the burdens of office. In the Republic of Plato statesmen are not improvised. And yet in this elaborate system of instruction Plato omits two subjects of great importance. On the one hand, he entirely omits the physical and natural sciences, because, in his mystic idealism, things of sense are delusive and unreal images, and so did not appear to him worthy of arresting the attention of the mind; and on the other, though coming after Herodotus, and though a contemporary of Thucydides, he makes no mention of history, doubtless through a contempt for tradition and the past.

32. The Laws.—In the Laws, the work of his old age, Plato disavows in part the chimeras of the Republic, and qualifies the radicalism of that earlier work. The philosopher descends to the earth and really condescends to the actual state of humanity. He renounces the distinction of social castes, and his very practical and very minute precepts are applied without distinction to children of all classes.[35]

First note this excellent definition of the end of education: “A good education is that which gives to the body and to the soul all the beauty and all the perfection of which they are capable.” As to methods, it seems that Plato hesitates between the doctrine of effort and the doctrine of attractive toil. In fact, he says on the one hand that education is a very skilful discipline which, by way of amusement,[36] leads the mind of the child to love that which is to make it finished. On the other hand, he protests against the weakness of those parents who seek to spare their children every trouble and every pain. “I am persuaded,” he says, “that the inclination to humor the likings of children is the surest of all ways to spoil them. We should not make too much haste in our search after what is pleasurable, especially as we shall never be wholly exempt from what is painful.”

Let us add this definition of a good education: “I call education the virtue which is shown by children when the feelings of joy or of sorrow, of love or of hate, which arise in their souls, are made conformable to order.”

With the statement of these principles, Plato enters into details. For children up to the age of six, he recommends the use of swaddling-clothes. The habit of rocking, the natural plays which children find out for themselves, the separation of the sexes; swimming, the bow, and the javelin, for boys; wrestling for giving bodily vigor, and dancing, for graceful movement; reading and writing reserved till the tenth year and learned for three years.

It would require too much time to follow the philosopher to the end. In the rules he proposes, he makes a near approach to the practices followed by the Athenians of his day. The Republic was a work of pure imagination. The Laws are scarcely more than a commentary on the actual state of practice. But here we still find what was nearest the soul of Plato, the constant search for a higher morality.

33. Xenophon.—As an educator, Xenophon obeyed two different influences. His master, Socrates, was his good genius. That graceful and charming book, the Economics, was written under the benign and tempered inspiration of the great Athenian sage. But Xenophon also had his evil genius,—the immoderate enthusiasm which he felt for Sparta, her institutions and her laws. The first book of the CyropÆdia, which relates the rules of Persian education, is an unfortunate imitation of the laws of Lycurgus.

34. The Economics, and the Education of Woman.—All should read the Economics, that charming sketch of the education of woman. We may say of this little work what Renan has said of the writings of Plutarch on the same subject: “Where shall we find a more charming ideal of family life? What good nature! What sweetness of manners! What chaste and lovable simplicity!” Before her marriage, the Athenian maiden has learned only to spin wool, to be discreet, and to ask no questions,—virtues purely negative. Xenophon assigns to her husband the duty of training her mind and of teaching her the positive duties of family life,—order, economy, kindness to slaves, and tender care of children. As a matter of fact, the Athenian woman was still held in a position of inferiority. Shut up in her own apartments, it was an exception that she learned to read and write; it was very rare that she was instructed in the arts and sciences. The idea of human dignity and of the value of the human person had not yet appeared. Man had value only in proportion to the services which he could render the State, or commonwealth, and woman formed no part of the commonwealth. Xenophon has the merit of rising above the prejudices of his time, and of approaching the ideal of the modern family, in calling woman to participate more intimately in the affairs of the house and in the occupations of the husband.[37]

35. The CyropÆdia.—The CyropÆdia is not worthy of the same commendation. Under the pretext of describing the organization of the Persian State, Xenophon here traces, after his manner, the plan of an education absolutely uniform and exclusively military. There is no domestic education, no individual liberty, no interest in letters and arts. When the period of infancy is over, the young Persian is made subject to military duty, and must not leave the encampment, even at night. The state is but a camp, and human existence a perpetual military parade. Montaigne praises Xenophon for having said that the Persians taught their children virtue “as other nations do letters.” But it is difficult to form an estimate of the methods which were followed in these schools of justice and temperance, and we may be allowed to suspect the efficiency of the means proposed by Xenophon; for example, that which consisted in transforming the petty quarrels of the scholars into regular trials which were followed by sentences, acquittals, or convictions. The author of the CyropÆdia is on surer ground when, recollecting his own studies, he recommends the study of history to those who would become just. He teaches temperance by practice rather than by precept; his pupils have only bread for their food, only cresses for seasoning, and only water for their drink.

Whatever may be the faults and the fancies of the CyropÆdia, we must recollect, as a partial excuse for them, that the purpose of the writer in tracing this picture of a simple, frugal, and courageous life, was to induce a reaction against the excesses of the fashionable and formal life of the Athenians. As Rousseau, in the middle of the eighteenth century, protested against the license and the artificial manners of his time by advising an imaginary return to nature, so Xenophon, a contemporary of the sophists, held forth the sturdy virtues of the Persians in opposition to the degenerate manners of the Greeks and the refinements of an advanced civilization.

36. Aristotle: General Character of his Plan of Education.—By his vast attainments, by his encyclopÆdic knowledge, by the experimental nature of his researches, and by the positive and practical tendencies of his genius, Aristotle was enabled to excel Plato in clearness of insight into pedagogical questions. He had another advantage over Plato in having known and enjoyed the delights of family life, and in having loved and trained his own children, of whom he said, “parents love their children as a part of themselves.” Let us add, finally, that he was a practical teacher, since he was the preceptor of Alexander from 343 to 340 B.C. Such opportunities, superadded to the force of the most mighty genius the world has ever seen, give promise of a competent and clear-sighted educator. Unfortunately, we have lost the treatise, On Education (pe?? pa?de?a?), which on the authority of Diogenes LaËrtius, Aristotle is said to have composed; and to form some conception of his ideas on education, we have at our disposal only some imperfect sketches, some portions, and those in an imperfect state, of his treatises on ethics and politics.[38]

Whoever labors to give stability to the family, and to tighten its bond of union, labors also for the promotion of education. Even in this respect, education is under great obligations to Aristotle. In him the communism of Plato finds an able critic. That feeling of affection which we of to-day would call charity or fraternity, he declared to be the guaranty and the foundation of social life. Now, communism weakens this feeling by diluting it, just as a little honey dropped into a large quantity of water thereby loses all its sweetness. “There are two things which materially contribute to the rise of interest and attachment in the hearts of men,—property and the feeling of affection.” It was thus in the name of good sense, and in opposition to the distempered fancies of Plato, that Aristotle vindicated the rights of the family and the individual.

37. Public Education.—But Aristotle does not go so far as his premises would seem to lead him, and relinquish to parents the care of educating their children. In accordance with the general tendencies of antiquity, he declares himself the partisan of an education that is public and common. He commends the Spartans for having ordained that “education should be the same for all.” “As there is one end in view in every city,” he says, “it is evident that education ought to be one and the same in all, and that this should be a common care, and not of each individual.... It is the duty of the legislator to regulate this interest for all the citizens.” There must, therefore, be the intervention of the State, not from the day of birth, as Plato would have it, for the nursing of infants, but only at the age of seven, for instructing and training them in the habits of virtue.

What, then, should be the training of the child, and upon what subjects would Aristotle direct his studies?

38. The Progressive Development of Human Nature.—An essential and incontrovertible distinction is taken by the Greek philosopher as his starting-point. There are, he says, three moments, three stages, in human development: first, there is the physical life of the body; then, instinct and sensibility, or the irrational part of the soul; and finally, the intelligence, or the reason. From this, Aristotle concludes that the course of discipline and study should be graduated according to these three degrees of life. “The first care should necessarily be given to the body rather than to the mind; and then to that part of the spiritual nature which is the seat of the desires.” But he adds this important observation, which is a refutation of Rousseau in advance: “In the care which we give to the sensibilities, we must not leave out of account the intelligence; and in our care of the body, we must not forget the soul.”

39. Physical Education.—The son of a physician of the Macedonian court, and well versed in the natural sciences, Aristotle is very happy in his treatment of physical education. It begins before the child is born, even before it has been conceived. Consequently he enjoins a legal regulation of marriages, interdicts unions that are too early or too late, indicates the climatic conditions most favorable for marriage, and gives mothers wise counsels on matters of hygiene, recommending them to nurse their own children, and prescribing cold baths. Such, in outline, is a plan which a modern hygienist would not disavow.

40. Intellectual and Moral Education.—It was the opinion of Aristotle that intellectual education should not begin before the age of five. But, in accordance with the principle stated above, this period of waiting should not be the occasion of loss to the intelligence of the child; even his play should be a preparation for the work to which he will apply himself at a later period. On the other hand, Aristotle strongly insists on the necessity of shielding the child from all pernicious influences, such as those which come from association with slaves, or from immoral plays.

In accord with all his contemporaries, Aristotle includes grammar, gymnastics, and music, among the elements of instruction. To these he adds drawing. But he is chiefly preoccupied with music, by reason of the moral influence which he attributes to it. He shared the prepossession which caused the Greeks to say, that to relax or to reform the manners of a people, it suffices to add a string to the lyre or to take one from it.[39]

Aristotle was strongly preoccupied with moral education. Like Plato, he insists on the greatest care in forming the moral habits of early life. In his different writings on ethics he has discussed different human virtues in a spirit at once wise, practical, and liberal. No one has better sung the praises of justice, of which he says, “Neither the evening nor the morning star inspires as much respect as justice.”

It would do Aristotle injustice to seek for a complete expression of his thoughts on education in the incomplete and curtailed statements of theory which are found in his Politics. In connection with these, we should recall the admirable instruction which he himself gave in the Lyceum, and which embraced almost all the sciences in its vast programme. He excluded from it only the sciences and the arts which have a mechanical and utilitarian character. Enslaved on this point to the prejudices of antiquity, he regarded as servile and unworthy of a free man whatever has a direct bearing on the practical and material utilities of life. He recommended to his hearers only studies of the intellectual type, those whose sole purpose is to elevate the mind and to fill it with noble thoughts.[40]

41. Faults in the Pedagogy of Aristotle, and in Greek Pedagogy in General.—It must be said in conclusion, that whatever admiration we may feel for the pedagogy of Aristotle, it was wrong, like that of all the Greek writers, in being but an aristocratic system of education. The education of which Plato and Aristotle dreamed was restricted to a small minority, and was even made possible only because the majority was excluded from it. The slaves, charged with the duty of providing for the sustenance of their superiors, and of creating for them the leisure claimed by Aristotle, had no more participation in education than in liberty or in property. In the century of Pericles, at the most glorious period of the Athenian republic, let us not forget that there were at Athens nearly four hundred thousand slaves to do the bidding of twenty thousand free citizens. To indulge in an easy admiration for Greek pedagogy, we must detach it from its setting, and consider it in itself, apart from the narrow plan on which the Greek states were constructed, and apart from that social rÉgime which assured the education of some, only by perpetuating the oppression of the many.

[42. Analytical Summary.—1. A leading conception in Greek education is that of symmetry, or harmony; the ideal man, in Plato’s phrase, must be “harmoniously constituted”; all opposing tendencies must be reconciled; and while the physical, the intellectual, and the moral must each be made the subject of systematic training, there must be no disproportionate development in either direction.

2. The preoccupation of the Greek teacher was discipline or culture, rather than the communication of useful knowledge; and the final aim was a life of contemplation, rather than a life of action; ethical rather than practical; “good conduct” rather than mastery over what is material.

3. Physical training received great emphasis, not as an end in itself, but as a means towards mental and spiritual health; and knowledge was valued chiefly as the means for attaining moral excellence.

4. The staple of instruction was wisdom, i.e., ethical and prudential knowledge, which was the basis of right action; and teaching, especially according to the Socratic conception of it, consisted in causing the pupil’s mind to react on the materials supplied by his own mind. Socrates, says Lewes, “believed that in each man lay the germs of wisdom. He believed that no science could be taught; only drawn out.”

5. The great teaching instrument was dialectic, i.e., discussion, resolution, or analysis. Its use assumed that the subject-matter of instruction was already in the pupil’s possession, and that the highest office of the teacher was to liberate the thought which had been formed by the active energies of the pupil’s own mind. This is the maieutic art of Socrates.

6. The mode of mental activity which was chiefly brought into requisition was the reason; in a secondary degree the imagination and the emotions; and in a still lower degree, the memory.

7. The large place assigned to music by Plato and Aristotle shows that the culture of the emotions was an important element in Greek education. Æsthetic training was not only an end in itself, but was regarded as the basis of moral and religious culture.

8. In the writings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, we see the first attempt to formulate a body of educational doctrine; we have the germs of a science of education based on psychology, ethics, and politics.

9. In the Republic, we see the theory of compulsion in both its phases: the State must provide an education suitable for State needs; and the young must accept this education because the State has ordained it. For the first time in the history of thought, the State appears distinctly and avowedly as an educator.

10. Practically, education was administered on the basis of caste; though in the construction of his ideal State, Plato made it possible for talent, industry, and worth, to find their proper level.]