The Schools Of Hellas
Wherever it occurred, schooling through the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (up until the last third of the
nineteenth) heavily invested its hours with language, philosophy, art,
and the life of the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. In the
grammar schools of the day, little pure grammar as we understand it
existed; they were places of classical learning. Early America rested
easily on a foundation of classical understanding, one subversive to the
normal standards of British class society. The lessons of antiquity
were so vital to the construction of every American institution it’s
hardly possible to grasp how deep the gulf between then and now is
without knowing a little about those lessons. Prepare yourself for a
surprise.
For a long time, for instance, classical Athens distributed its most responsible public positions by lottery:
army generalships, water supply, everything. The implications are
awesome— trust in everyone’s competence was assumed; it was their
version of universal driving. Professionals existed but did not make key
decisions; they were only technicians, never well regarded because
prevailing opinion held that technicians had enslaved their own minds.
Anyone worthy of citizenship was expected to be able to think clearly
and to welcome great responsibility. As you reflect on this, remember
our own unvoiced assumption that anyone can guide a ton of metal
traveling at high speed with three sticks of dynamite sloshing around in
its tanks.
When we ask what kind of schooling was behind
this brilliant society which has enchanted the centuries ever since,
any honest reply can be carried in one word: None. After writing a book
searching for the hidden genius of Greece in its schools, Kenneth
Freeman concluded his unique study The Schools of Hellas in 1907
with this summary, "There were no schools in Hellas." No place boys and
girls spent their youth attending continuous instruction under command
of strangers. Indeed, nobody did homework in the modern sense; none
could be located on standardized tests. The tests that mattered came in
living, striving to meet ideals that local tradition imposed. The word sköle itself means leisure, leisure in a formal garden to think and reflect. Plato in The Laws is the first to refer to school as learned discussion.
The most famous school in Athens was Plato’s
Academy, but in its physical manifestation it had no classes or bells,
was a well-mannered hangout for thinkers and seekers, a generator of
good conversation and good friendship, things Plato thought lay at the
core of education. Today we might call such a phenomenon a salon.
Aristotle’s Lyceum was pretty much the same, although Aristotle
delivered two lectures a day—a tough one in the morning for intense
thinkers, a kinder, gentler version of the same in the afternoon for
less ambitious minds. Attendance was optional. And the famous Gymnasium
so memorable as a forge for German leadership later on was in reality
only an open training ground where men sixteen to fifty were free to
participate in high-quality, state-subsidized instruction in boxing,
wrestling, and javelin.
The idea of schooling free men in anything
would have revolted Athenians. Forced training was for slaves. Among
free men, learning was self-discipline, not the gift of experts. From
such notions Americans derived their own academies, the French their lycees, and the Germans their gymnasium.
Think of it: In Athens, instruction was unorganized even though the
city-state was surrounded by enemies and its own society engaged in the
difficult social experiment of sustaining a participatory democracy,
extending privileges without precedent to citizens, and maintaining
literary, artistic, and legislative standards which remain to this day
benchmarks of human genius. For its five-hundred-year history from Homer
to Aristotle, Athenian civilization was a miracle in a rude world;
teachers flourished there but none was grounded in fixed buildings with
regular curricula under the thumb of an intricately layered bureaucracy.
There were no schools in Hellas. For the Greeks, study was its own reward. Beyond that few cared to go.
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