The History Of Education | Page 7

Greece lies at the bottom and, in a sense, was the most important of all the earlier contributions to our education and civilization. These people, known as Hellenes, were the pioneers of western civilization. Their position in the ancient world is well shown on the map reproduced opposite. To the East lay the older political despotisms, with their caste-type and intellectually stagnant organization of society, and to the North and West a little-known region inhabited by barbarian tribes. It was in such a world that our western civilization had its birth. These Greeks, and especially the Athenian Greeks, represented an entirely new spirit in the world. In place of the repression of all individuality, and the stagnant conditions of society that had characterized the civilizations before them, they developed a civilization characterized by individual freedom and opportunity, and for the first time in world history a premium was placed on personal and political initiative. In time this new western spirit was challenged by the older eastern type of civilization. Long foreseeing the danger, and in fear of what might happen, the little Greek States had developed educational systems in part designed to prepare their citizens for what might come. Finally, in a series of memorable battles, the Greeks, led by Athens, broke the dread power of the Persian name and made the future of this new type of civilization secure. At Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea the fate of our western civilization trembled in the balance. Now followed the great creative period in Greek life, during which the Athenian Greeks matured and developed a literature, philosophy, and art which were to be enjoyed not only by themselves, but by all western peoples since their time. In these lines of culture the world will forever remain debtor to this small but active and creative people.
[Illustration: FIG. I. THE EARLY GREEK CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD The World according to Hecataeus, a geographer of Miletus, Asia Minor. Hecataeus was the first Greek traveler and geographer. The map dates from about 500 B.C.]
The next great source of our western civilization was the work of Rome. Like the Greeks, the Romans also occupied a peninsula jutting southward into the Mediterranean, but in most respects they were far different in type. Unlike the active, imaginative, artistic, and creative Greeks, the Romans were a practical, concrete, unimaginative, and executive people. Energy, personality, and executive power were in greatest demand among them.
The work of Rome was political, governmental, and legal--not artistic or intellectual. Rome was strong where Greece was weak, and weak where Greece was strong. As a result the two peoples supplemented one another well in laying the foundations for our western civilization. The conquests of Greece were intellectual; those of Rome legal and governmental. Rome absorbed and amalgamated the whole ancient world into one Empire, to which she gave a common language, dress, manners, religion, literature, and political and legal institutions. Adopting Greek learning and educational practices as her own, she spread them throughout the then-known world. By her political organization she so fixed Roman ideas as to law and government throughout the Empire that Christianity built firmly on the Roman foundations, and the German barbarians, who later swept over the Empire, could neither destroy nor obliterate them. The Roman conquest of the world thus decisively influenced the whole course of western history, spread and perpetuated Greek ideas, and ultimately saved the world from a great disaster.
To Rome, then, we are indebted most of all for ideas as to government, and for the introduction of law and order into an unruly world. In all the intervening centuries between ancient Rome and ourselves, and in spite of many wars and repeated onslaughts of barbarism, Roman governmental law still influences and guides our conduct, and this influence is even yet extending to other lands and other peoples. We are also indebted to Rome for many practical skills and for important engineering knowledge, which was saved and passed on to Western Europe through the medium of the monks. On the other side of the picture, the recent great World War, with all its awful destruction of life and property, and injury to the orderly progress of civilization, may be traced directly to the Roman idea of world empire and the sway of one imperial government, imposing its rule and its culture on the rest of mankind.
Into this Roman Empire, united and made one by Roman arms and government, came the first of the modern forces in the ancient world--that of Christianity--the third great foundation element in our western civilization. Embracing in its early development many Greek philosophical ideas, building securely on the Roman governmental organization, and with its new message for a decaying world, Christianity forms the connecting link between the ancient and modern civilizations. Taking the conception of one