A history of education

Preface

To be strictly accurate, the title of this book should have been " A Brief History of Education, as Conscious Evolution." To record, even summarily, the facts and events in the long history of education, within the narrow limits of a text-book, would have been both impossible and undesirable. My endeavor has been to present education as the last and highest form of evolution — that great process which includes both Nature and Culture. I have tried to show what it is that evolves, why it evolves, and why evolution, finally attaining to consciousness, becomes education. Seeing that the immanent purpose of evolution is the realization of free individuals, that is, moral personalities, I have endeavored to mark the steps by which this has been gradually attained, and to indicate those that have yet to be taken.

By placing education in relation to the whole process of evolution, as its highest form, I have hoped to impart to it a dignity which it could hardly otherwise receive or claim. From many points of view, the educator's profession seems mean and profitless enough, compared with those that make more noise in the world; but when it is recognized to be the highest phase of the world-process, and the teacher to be the chief agent in that process, both it and he assume a very different aspect. Then

VI PKEFACE

teaching is seen to be the noblest of professions, and that which ought to call for the highest devotion and enthusiasm.

In the present work I have given special attention to those portions of educational history that are usually ignored or neglected, at the expense of those that are more generally known. This accounts for the chapter on Muslim Education and several others. And I have laid somewhat less stress on those portions of the history treated in the " Great Educators," issued by the same publishers.

Eeference to the Bibliography will show that I have made very little use of previous histories of education. The reason of this is, not that I failed to appreciate them, but that my aim was different from theirs.

Some of my generalizations are, I know, open to question. In defence, I have only to say that in all cases I have given what seemed to me best calculated to impart a comprehensive view of the entire subject.

The quotations at the head of most of the chapters are intended as texts for lectures or discussions.

Thomas Davidson.

New York, April 20, 1900.

Book I Savage, Barbarian, And Civic Education Chapter Page

I. Introductory 1

II. The Rise of Intelligence 13

III. Savage Education 18

IV. Barbarian Education 24

(A) Ancient Turanian Education . . . .30

(1) Sumir and Akkad (Chaldaea) . .32

(2) Egypt 37

(3) China 41

(B) Ancient Semitic Education . . . .45

Babylonia and Assyria . . . .47

(C) Ancient Aryan Education . . . .55

(1) India 58

(2) Iran (Medo-Persia) 66

V. Civic Education 75

(1) Judaea 77

(2) Greece 86

Vlll TABLE OF CONTENTS

Book II Human Education Pasb

DIVISION I.— SUPERNATURAL BEGINNINGS OF HUMANISM

CHAPTER

I. Hellenistic Education 117

II. The Christian "Catechetical School" of Alexandria 121

III. Patristic Education 127

IV. Muslim Education . . ' 133

(I.) Propedeutic and Logic 139

(II.) The Natural Sciences 141

(III.) The Rational World-Soul . . . .145

DIVISION II— MEDIAEVAL EDUCATION

I. Period of Charles the Great 151

II. Scholasticism and Mysticism 159

III. The Medieval Unfversities ..... 166

IV. Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reforma-

tion 175

DIVISION HI.— MODERN EDUCATION

I. The Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries 190

II. The Eighteenth Century 209

III. The Nineteenth Century 220

IV. The Outlook 254

INDEX 283

BOOK I.

SAVAGE, BARBARIAN, AND CIVIC EDUCATION

CHAPTEE I.

Desire then in the beginning arose, the first germ of mind. The bond betwixt Non-Being and Being, as knowledge, wise men find hid in their hearts. — Veda.

Feeling is a primitive datum. The question, therefore, is not how feeling arises, but how it is modified and how it gives birth to sensation. — Rosmini, New Essay, § 717.

The Ego which reflects upon itself, finds that, at bottom, it is a feeling that constitutes the sentient and intelligent subject. — Ibid., §719.

The sentient subject ... is not deduced from a long train of reasoning, but from a simple analysis of the idea of existing sensation. . . . To conceive an existing sensation is to conceive a substance. — Ibid., § 643.

While philosophers are wrangling over the government of the world, Hunger and Love are doing their work. — Schiller.

It is not in knowledge, as such, but in feeling and action that reality is given. — A. Setii, Man's Place in the Cosmos, p. 122.

History, as at present understood, is a record of evolution, which, according to Mr. Spencer, is a " change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations." Education is conscious or voluntary evolution. Hence, History of Education" is a record of such evolution, and begins at the point where man takes himself into his own hand, so to speak, and seeks to guide his life toward an ever more definite, coherent heterogeneity, which is what we mean by his ideal end.

Of the beginning of evolution we have no experiential knowledge, and, indeed, cannot even imagine it as beginning. A popular evolutionist tells us: " The earliest condition in which Science allows us to picture this globe is that of a fiery mass of nebulous matter. At the second stage it consists of countless myriads of similar atoms, roughly outlined into a ragged cloud-ball, glowing with heat, and rotating in space with inconceivable velocity. By what means can this mass be broken up, or broken down, and made into a solid world? By two things — mutual attraction and chemical affinity. The moment when within the cloud-ball the conditions of cooling temperature are such that two atoms could combine together, the cause of the evolution of the earth was won. . . . With every additional atom added, the power, as well as the complexity of the combination increases. As the process goes on, after endless vicissitudes, repulsions, and readjustments, the changes become fewer and fewer, the conflict between mass and mass dies down; the elements, passing through various stages of liquidity, finally combine in the order of their affinities, arrange themselves in the order of their densities, and the solid earth is formed.

" Now, recall the names of the leading actors in this stupendous reformation. They are two in number, mutual attraction and chemical affinity. Notice these words, attraction and affinity. Notice that the great formative forces of physical evolution have psychical names. It is idle to discuss whether there is, or can be, any identity between the thing represented in the one case and in the other. Obviously there cannot be. Yet this does not exhaust the interest of the analogy. In reality, neither here nor anywhere, have we any knowledge whatever of what is actually meant by attraction; nor in the one sphere or the other have we even the means of approximating to such knowledge. . . . Here, as in every deep recess of physical Nature, we are in the presence of that which is metaphysical, that which bars the way imperiously at every turn to a materialistic interpretation of the world. Yet . . . what likeness, even the most remote, could we have expected to trace between the gradual aggregation of units of matter in the condensation of a weltering star and the slow segregation of man in the organization of societies and nations? However different the agents, is there no suggestion that they are different stages of a uniform process, different epochs of one great historic enterprise, different results of a single evolutionary law?"*

To the last question we may unhesitatingly answer, Yes. We may even go further, and assert that, unless we are to be condemned to the author's hopeless agnosticism, and the evolution of the world is forever to remain a mystery to us, it must be interpreted in terms of experience, that is, at bottom, of feeling, including desire. Nor ought this to surprise us; for, since the world of experience — and we can talk intelligently of no other — consists of nothing but feelings grouped and classi-

* Henry Drummond, The Ascent of Man, p. 337 sqq. Cf. Tennyson, In Memoriam, cxviii. and Epilogue, near end ; also Vedic Hymn, in Max Milller's History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 564.

fied, there is every reason for interpreting it in terms of feeling. Such interpretation is mere analysis, as it ought to be, involving the assumption of nothing outside of experience. If we assume feeling, including desire, as the stuff of the world, we have no difficulty in explaining evolution upon known principles. There can, in the last analysis, be no intelligible active principle but desire; and, since all desire is a tendency to greater depth or variety of feeling, it is, of necessity, an evolutionary energy. Further, all desire implies the existence of something desired, but not possessed, or of environment, and so we are forced to conceive of feeling as atomic, or individual, in its nature. The world is made up of a multitude of what we may call " substantial feelings," each having all the rest for its environment,* and each, through desire, modifying, and being modified by, all the rest. The sum of the modifications of each substantial feeling by all the rest is its world, and the sum of the modifications of all feelings is the world.

How one substantial feeling can become aware of the existence of another is a question requiring more detailed treatment than can be given it here; but that each such feeling is completely impervious to all others is a fact of hourly experience. By no possibility can I feel your toothache, however clearly I may realize it in my own imagination. You must always be to me an hypothesis (or virocn acres). This is the price we pay for our eternal individuality. Nor does it involve ag-

* We must take care not to imagine that behind the " fundamental feelings" (Rosmini's phrase) there is a substance, unpenetrated by feeling. Such a thing-in-itself, being beyond experience, would open the door for a boundless agnosticism.

nosticism, but merely the consequence that omniscience is a social product, shared in by all beings.

If we adopt this view of the constitution of the world, a view accordant with all experience, we see at once that all evolution is, in a sense, education. It is the gradual internal differentiation of substantial feelings, their transformation or articulation, through mutual desire and interaction, into worlds. Education, in the widest sense, may be defined as the upbuilding of a world in feeling or in consciousness. With our present habit of confining feeling to the animal world, and making it include a certain amount of memory or consciousness, we find it hard to regard the inanimate mineral world, and even the animate vegetable world, as due to the interaction of feelings. Yet all that they are to us is so much feeling — so many clusters of sensation — and, unless we are to attribute the introduction of life to a miracle, and acknowledge the bankruptcy of science, we must regard the very lowest forms of matter as, to a certain extent, alive and sentient. One thing is obvious: except in so far as they are feelings, we can never know anything about them. And what could they be in or for themselves, that is, apart from our knowledge of them, if they were not feelings?

If this reasoning is correct, then the entire evolution of the world, from lowest to highest, is simply the external aspect of the education of substantial feelings, or, to use a familiar term, of spirits. It is true, indeed, that actual experience has not enabled us to supply all the links in the long chain. Especially desiderated are the links between the inanimate and the animate, and between instinctive and ethical life. Yet we need not

6 THE niSTORY OF EDUCATION

despair of one day discovering these. Of the former, Huxley, a sober witness, says: " With organic chemistry, molecular physics, and physiology yet in their infancy, and every day making prodigious strides, I think it would be the height of presumption for any man to say that the conditions under which matter assumes the properties we call ' vital ' may not, some day, be artificially brought together. . . . If it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth, was passing through physical and chemical changes, which it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from not living matter." * Of the second missing link I shall speak further on.

One more quotation from Huxley! " If there is one thing clear about the progress of modern science, it is the tendency to reduce all scientific problems, except those which are purely mathematical, to questions of molecular physics — that is to say, to the attractions, repulsions, motions, and co-ordination of the ultimate particles of matter. Social phenomena are the result of interaction of the components of society, or men, with one another and the surrounding universe." f Huxley had to remain an agnostic (to use a word of his own invention) to the end of his days. The reason why he did so is plain from the above quotation. He maintained that all scientific problems, not strictly mathe-

* Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Revieivs, p. 366. How something living can evolve from something not-living is utterly inconceivable, implying creation. Huxley {ibid., p. 146) tells us that "matter may be regarded as a form of thought," which is hardly correct.

matical, must be solved in terms of the relations of the ultimate elements of matter, and then most gratuitously assumed that these elements were "particles." But such particles do not come within the reach of experience, and, if they did, they could only be groups of feelings. Hence, the ultimate elements of matter are feelings. Let us, then, substitute " feelings " for " particles " in the quotation, and we at once do away with the possibility of agnosticism, and obtain a formula which accounts for evolution, from first to last — even for the mathematical aspect of it. We may now write: All scientific problems may be reduced to the attractions, repulsions, motions, and co-ordination of the ultimate substantial feelings. Even social phenomena are the result of the interaction of the components of society, of men (who are merely substantial feelings highly differentiated through long and extensive interaction), with one another and with the remaining universe of substantial feelings of all grades. In other words, all the world that Ave know, or can know, consists of primitive substantial feelings, differentiating themselves, through interaction, into worlds. The voluntary or reflective part of this differentiation we call education. It is fortunate that there exist now, in the world, beings at all stages of evolution, from matter up to man, and that the latter is the sum and epitome of the entire process thus far. In spite of this, we find it very difficult to realize the exceedingly simple psychical life of the primal elements of inorganic matter, and even of organic bodies of low type— plants, microbes, snails, etc. The attractions and repulsions, resulting in the motions and co-ordinations of material molecules, we can conceive only as due to the desires of spirits, and yet we cannot throw ourselves back into their inner states. The case is not very different with plant life. Who can realize the feelings and desires of those primal elements which build up an oak or a vine? Yet wo can hardly doubt that a feeling of thirst is what makes a plant send out its root-mouths in the direction of water, and a feeling of weakness what induces it to encircle a support with its tendril-arms. So, in general, perhaps, we may interpret the actions of plants in terms of our own feelings. And this we can do more securely in the case of animals. No one can well doubt that a monkey, a dog, a rabbit, a tadpole, or an 'amoeba eats, drinks, and moves in consequence of feelings similar to ours when we do the same. Thus we are able, in ways more or less vague, to realize to ourselves those sentient desires which are the agents in all evolution, and so, to that extent, to understand the world. It may be that, in the future, through hypnotism or some such agency, we shall be able to recall into consciousness the entire course of past evolution.

Evolution, then, is the material of science, including history, and of philosophy. In the future, philosophy will not, as in the past, imitate theology in trying to dictate to science from without, but will be simply the complete record of which the particular sciences are the co-ordinated parts.* Even now philosophy is able to tell us that all evolution is a matter of association for the satisfaction of desire, f that the universe is essentially

* Philosophy is completely unified knowledge. Spencer, First Principles, Pt. II., cap. 1, §37.

tSee Aristotle, Politics, I., 1; 1252a seq.; Ethics, I., 1; 1094a seq.; and cf. Dante, Purg., X., XI.

social; that the evolution of sentient individuals into an ever richer world depends upon ever widening and deepening relations to other sentient individuals; that socialism and individualism are absolutely co-extensive all the world over. What is true of human society is true of all nature; and the principles which we find governing the former we may confidently look for in the latter. The true meaning of the lowest phases of evolution can be found only in the highest, just as the meaning of the acorn can be found only in the fullgrown oak.* The first step will not be fully understood until the last is taken, which will never be!

Taking human society, then, as the highest type of all association, we can readily see that it has three possible forms, and no moref — (1) co-ordination or democracy, (2) individual superordination, or monarchy, and (3) a combination of the two, oligarchy. The bodies in the mineral world seem to be democracies, no atom or individual being lord over another; and the same is true, to a certain extent, of the plant world. Many of the lower forms of animal life — worms, protozoa, ccelenterates, etc., are oligarchies; % but the higher w r e go in the scale the more nearly do the forms approach the condition of monarchy. In man, the sentient elements composing the body are in almost entire subjection to the central sentience which he calls himself. § Where there is no rebellion, we have a man of integrity, an integer; otherwise, a dissolute or fractional man. But

* In Aristotelian language, the oak is the " what-it-was-ness " (to ti fiv elvai) of the acorn. See Metaph., Z., 4 ; 1030a, 17, with Bonitz's note.

t See Aristotle, Politics, III., 7 ; 1279a, 22 seq.

X Rosmini, Psychology, § 462 seq. Geddes and Thomson, Evolution of Sex, Chapp. VII., XIV.

§ Shakespeare, Sonnet CXLVI.

even in a completely integral body, monarchical as a bee-hive, there are arrangements for swarming, or colonizing. Certain subordinate combinations, which we call reproductive cells, sunder themselves naturally from the whole, and, carrying with them its potentialities, set up a new monarchy, a new human body, for themselves. In the case of these, the process of evolution, which originally took millions upon millions of years, is completed in a few prenatal months. Thus, through beneficent association, every animal organism is able to raise subordinate organisms, of almost the lowest form, to its own level in a short time, and thus spare them uncounted ages of evolutionary struggle. It is no secret at the present day that the human embryo, before birth, goes through the whole process, of evolution, assuming, in an ascending series, all the lower forms of animal life, just as, after birth, it passes through all the phases of ethical life. It is all one continuous process, producing ever more complete and independent individuals, through ever deepening and widening social relations. Here come in the great questions of heredity and habituation.

If, now, we ask how, out of primitive desiderant feelings, the various types of animal life — microbes, mollusks, whales, men — have arisen, we readily find an intelligible answer, supported by obvious facts, and at the same time full of meaning for the educator. As we have already seen, the primitive desiderant feelings, whose interaction evolves the world and explains it, have two aspects — a passive (feeling) and an active (desire). In the lowest phases of existence these are completely balanced, a fact which we express by saying that, in physics, action and reaction are always, equal. But, just in proportion as we rise in the scale of being, and reaction becomes less and less immediate, this balance disappears. Indeed, we may perhaps say that the position of beings in that scale is determined by their power to inhibit direct reaction and to treasure up their passive impressions for future use, such treasuring-up being the origin of consciousness. Consciousness is, from one point of view, inhibited reaction. So long as impressions are treasured up, solely with a view to purposive future reactions, the balance between action and reaction may still be kept even, and this is the only healthy condition of things; but it may also become uneven, either because impressions are treasured up for the mere pleasure they give, or because the reactions are excessive or purposeless. In the former case, we have a stagnant, dalliant sensuality; in the latter, a fatuous, spasmodic activity. Both these are equally unfavorable to evolution, the one producing beings of the Caliban, the other, beings of the Ariel, type.* Just as the perfect balance between passive feeling and active desire keeps open the path of evolution, so the loss of this balance blocks it, and gives rise to all the sub-human, unprogressive forms of life, and to all those types of humanity — savages, barbarians, heathens f — that have fallen, or are falling, behind in the race of life. If a house divided against itself cannot stand, so a living being whose nature is out of balance cannot progress — a fact of no small con-

*See The Tempest. It is quite evident that Caliban and Ariel are meant, respectively, as types of sensuality and caprice. Ferdinand and Miranda are balanced progressive types.

+ "EBvikoL, peoples who, though civilized, have not risen above national or race interests. The future belongs to peoples who have risen to human interests.

sequence to educators. Many living types have died out from mere inner disharmony or one-sided evolution.* Man has risen above the brute condition simply because he has been able to hold the balance between feeling and action comparatively even, and his further advance will depend upon how far he is able to do this in the future. Though, from one point of view, he stands over against, or above, nature, f in another, he is merely its highest product. In order to explain him, its entire process is required, and this can be learnt only through scientific investigation. " To ingenious attempts at explaining by the light of reason things which want the light of history to show their meaning, much of the learned nonsense of the world has indeed been due." \

t By "nature," I, of course, mean, not a power standing outside and above the individuals whose interactions produce the world, but merely the sum and system of those interactions themselves. It is unfortunate that, in our time, Nature (with a capital) is often spoken of as if it were God, minus consciousness.

JTylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. I., pp. 19seq.

Chapter II. The Rise Of Intelligence

Under what circumstances, and how long ago, man first rose above the brute, we cannot at present say. That the event may have been sudden, like an avalanche, or the turning of a balance, is quite possible; that it took place many millions of years ago seems certain. In the course of that long period, certain portions of the race — those which have kept open the path of evolution — have passed through the stages of (1) Savagery, (2) Barbarism, (3) Civicism or Civilization, and are now advancing to (4) Humanism — while the rest have remained behind, some at each of the lower stages. Now, since each of these stages has its corresponding education, the History of Education naturally falls into four divisions: (1) savage, (2) barbarian, (3) civic, (4) human. We shall treat them in this order; but before doing so, we must outline the leading features of each of the divisions, and, first of all, state the principles according to which they are distinguished.

Though the grades of humanization pass, for the most part, insensibly into each other, yet, regarded from a sufficient distance, they are readily distinguishable. The scale upon which all evolution is measured is simply that of being. That which is more is higher than that which is less. Now, since, as we have seen, being is feeling, or desiderant feeling, it follows that that which has (or, rather, is) more, and more highly differentiated, feeling and desire, is higher than that which has less. And we may perhaps set it down that the body of every living being fairly represents the amount and articulation of its, desiderant feeling; for, as Spenser says, " The soul is form, and doth the body make."

Here is offered a favorable opportunity for withdrawing the clumsy expression, " desiderant feeling," and substituting for it the ordinary term, " soul," which, when carefully examined, proves to have just that meaning. Soul is the fundamental, substantial feeling and desire, of which all other feelings and desires, and, ultimately, the known world itself, are determinations or articulations. My world is nothing but my self or soul — the feeling which I am — modified and articulated. We shall see later what is implied in such articulation. One group of such articulations is the body, a system of subordinate feelings, by which the soul carries out further articulations and produces its world. If the view here taken of the soul be correct, then the much vexed question of the immortality of the soul becomes almost ridiculous. Can that of which all things in time and space, and these themselves, are but modifications, vanish in time? So long as feeling and desire continue , merely such, so long the soul which they constitute remains in a brute condition, without any world of things.* It is only when, under the pressure of complicated and unmanageable experience, they give birth to intelligence and will, themselves remaining in the

*See Aristotle, ITetajifnjs., I., 1 ; 9S0b, 25 seq.

THE KISE OF INTELLIGENCE 15

form of love,* that the soul emerges from this condition, and begins to have a world of things, with language to designate them by. It is then that it begins to be human. Intelligence is simply the grouping of feelings and the referring of them, as so grouped, to origins, or subjects, or things. Thinking is, in the strictest sense, thing-ing.f Until there are things, there are no thoughts, and vice versa. As soon as things are thought J and symbolized, then desire, taking the form of will, relates itself to them as means, or instruments, of satisfaction — the only possible end. Since subjects, or things, can never be matters of experience, but are, so to speak, hypotheses,§ to group experience for use as means, they can be realized only through symbols or conventions, || and of such language consists. All words originally designated things, that is, hypothetical agents, uniting and causing certain groups of experiences. What corresponds internally to the outered or uttered word is the concept, or grasping-together of experiences (Begriff), a combining act of the soul, capable of indefinite repetition.

In emerging from the brute state, then, man found

* We thus see why love is never quite rational, though it constantly tends to become so.

" To be wise and love Exceeds man's might ; that dwells with gods above."

Troilus and Cressida, III., 2.

tCf. Ger. denken, Ding ; Latin reor, res ; Greek xp*<-> (declare), xpw«- In Hebrew, dabhar means both thought and thing. Cf. Arabic shay (thing), from shot a (desire).

X In the second Prologue to Faust, the Lord says to the archangels : "The Becoming (i.e., genesis, evolution), which ever works and lives, embrace you with love's gracious bounds ; and what hovers in unsteady seeming, do ye make steady with enduring thoughts." Nothing could be finer !

§ "Hypothesis" (un-o(W<.«) means exactly the same as "subject" (snbjecturri).

| Su^oAof, convention, watch-word, creed.

16 THE HISTOEY OF EDUCATION

himself a thinking, loving, willing being, in a world of concrete things or beings, grasped by means of symbols and available as instruments of satisfaction. In other words, he found himself a symbol-making, aim-setting, tool-using animal. The symbol-making power which gave him his present, real world enabled him to project into the future a more satisfactory, ideal world; his aim-setting faculty, love, turned this into an object of aspiration; and his tool-using gift made him employ the present world as a means for realizing it.* Such has been, and is, the life of man. In the first stages of his career, his world, his aims, and his tools were meagre; but as he advanced they became richer. This increasing richness coincides with the progress of civilization.