Education: How Old The New

Most of the thoughts contained in this volume were originally expressed at our breakfasts. It seems only fitting, then, that on presentation to a larger audience they should be dedicated to you.

PREFACE

The reason for publishing this volume of lectures and addresses is the persuasion that present-day educators are viewing the history of education with short-sighted vision. An impression prevails that only the last few generations have done work of serious significance in education. The history of old-time education is neglected, or is treated as of at most antiquarian interest and there is a failure to understand its true value. The connecting link between the lectures and addresses is the effort to express in terms of the present what educators were doing in the past. Once upon a time, when I proclaimed the happiness of the English workmen of the Middle Ages, the very positive objection was raised, "How could they be happy since their wages were only a few cents a day?" For response it was only necessary to point out that for his eight cents, the minimum wage by act of Parliament, the workman could buy a pair of handmade shoes, that being the maximum price established by law, and other necessaries at similar prices. If old-time education is studied with this same care to translate its meaning into modern values, then the very oldest education of which we have any record takes on significance even for our time.

While it is generally supposed that there are many new features in modern education, it requires but slight familiarity with educational history to know that there is very little that is novel. Such supposedly new phases as nature-study and technical training and science, physical as well as ethical, are all old stories, though they have had negative phases during which it would be hard to to trace them. The more we know about the history of education the greater is our respect for educators at all times. Nearly always they had a perfectly clear idea of what they were trying to do, they faced the problems of education in quite the same spirit that we do and often solved them very well. Indeed the results of many periods of old-time education are much better than our own, even when judged by our standards.

Unfortunately there exists a very common persuasion that evolution plays a large role in education and that we, "the heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time," are necessarily in the forefront of educational advance. There has been much progress in education in the last century, but it would, indeed, be a hopeless world if there had not been progress out of the depths in which education was plunged in the eighteenth century. There were a number of reformers in education at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was rather easy to be an educational reformer at that time. The lowest period in the history of education was about the middle of the eighteenth century. It has been assumed that since we are far ahead of that generation we must be still farther ahead of the people who preceded them. That is the mistake. There are periods of education of very great significance centuries long before that time.

In educational lectures and addresses for the past five years, I have been trying to translate into modern terms the meaning of these old periods of education. A great many teachers have thought the ideas valuable and suggestive and so I am tempted to publish them in book form. There is an additional reason, that of wishing to create a bond of sympathy between the two systems of education that have grown up in this country. For some three generations now Catholic educators have been independently building up a system of education from the elementary schools to the university. The American world of education is coming to recognize how much they have accomplished. There has even been some curiosity expressed as to how it was all done in spite of apparently insuperable obstacles. One phase of Catholic education, its thorough-going conservatism and definite effort to value the past properly and take advantage of its precious lessons, is here represented.

My own educational interests have been taken up much more of late years with medicine than with other phases of this subject. Hence the volume contains certain addresses relating to the history of medical education. They are more intimately linked with the general subject of education than might perhaps be thought. We have had finely organized medical education at a number of times in the past, and, indeed, at the present moment can find inspiration and incentive in studying the legal regulation of medicine and of medical education in what might seem to be so-unpromising a time as the thirteenth century. For true educational progress there has always been need of close sympathy between the non-professional and the professional department of universities. Only when the professional schools are real graduate departments, requiring under-graduate training for admission, is the university doing its work properly. This was the rule in the past–hence the precious lessons for the present in the story of these old-time universities.

These lectures and addresses were actually delivered, not merely read. They were written with that purpose. Certain repetitions that would have been avoided if the articles had been prepared directly for reading and not for an audience, may be noted. Some of the subjects overlap and certain phases had to be treated usually in variant form in different lectures. For these faults the reader's indulgence is craved.

"Nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say: Behold this is new: For it hath already gone before in the ages that were before us."

–-Ecclesiastes i:10.

"Nullum est jam dictum, quod non dictum sit prius."

–-Terence, Eun. Prol., 41.

[Nothing is now said which was not said before.]

St. Jerome relates that his preceptor Donatus, commenting on this passage of Terence, used to say: "Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt."

[May they perish who said our good things before us.]

EDUCATION, HOW OLD THE NEW 1

Popular lectures are usually on some very up-to-date subject. Indeed, as a rule they are on subjects that are developing at the moment, and the main aim of the lecturer is to forecast the future. It is before a thing has happened that we want to know about it now, and though, as not infrequently occurs, the lecturer's forecast does not in the event prove him a prophet nor the son of a prophet, for nature usually accomplishes her purposes more simply than the closet philosopher anticipates, at least we have the satisfaction for the moment of thinking that not only are we up to date but a little ahead of it. Unfortunately I have to claim your indulgence this evening in this matter, for taking just the opposite course. I am to talk about the oldest book in the world, its old-fashioned yet novel contents, its up-to-date applications, and its significance for the history of the race and, above all, the history of education. The one interesting feature, as I hope, of what I have to say, is that old-time methods in education as suggested by this little volume are strangely familiar and its contents are as significant now as they were in the old time from which it comes. The book was written almost as long before Solomon as Solomon is before us, yet there is a depth of practical wisdom about it that eminently recalls the expression "there is nothing new under the sun."

So much attention has been given to education in recent years, we have made such a prominent feature of it in life, have spent so much money on it, have devoted so much time and thought to its development and organization, that we feel very sure that what we are doing now in every line of educational effort represents–indeed must represent–a great advance over anything and everything that was ever accomplished in the past. To say anything else would seem to most people pure pessimism. It would mean that in spite of all the efforts of men we were not making advances. As a matter of fact, all of us know that it is quite possible to make heroic efforts so sadly misdirected that they accomplish nothing and get us nowhere. Progress depends not on effort but on the proper direction of the effort. We are supposed, however, to represent one phase and that at the front rank of an inevitable advance in things human, pushed forward, as it were, by the wheel of evolution in its ceaseless progress, and bound therefore to make advancement. It is with this idea, so commonly accepted, that I would take issue by showing how much was accomplished in the past that anticipates much of what we are occupied with at the present time, and that serves to show what men can accomplish at any time when they set themselves to doing things with high ideals, well-considered purpose and strenuous effort.

There are those who insist that unless men have the encouraging feeling that they are making progress, their efforts are likely to be less strenuous than would otherwise be the case. There are those who think apparently that compliments make the best incentive for successful effort. Some of us who know that the world's best work, or at least the work of many of the world's great men, has been done in the midst of opposition, in the very teeth of criticism, in spite of discouragement, may not agree with that opinion. The history of successful accomplishment seems to show, indeed, that incentive is all the stronger as the result of the opposition which arouses to renewed efforts and the criticism which strips whatever is new of errors that inevitably cling to it at the beginning. On the other hand, if there is anything that the lessons of history make clear it is that self-complacency is the very worst thing, above all for intellectual effort of any kind, and that criticism, when judicious, is always beneficial.

Above all, comparisons are likely to be chastening in their effects to make us realize that what we are doing at any particular time does not mean so much more than what many others have done and may indeed even mean less. It is rather interesting, then, to set our complacent assurance that we are doing such wonderful work in education and represent such magnificent progress over against some of the educational work of the past. After all we are not nearly so self-congratulatory about our education, its ways and methods and, above all, its success as we were a dozen years ago. There are many jarring notes of discordant criticism of methods heard, there are many deprecatory remarks passed with regard to our supposed success, and there have been some educators unkind enough,–and, unfortunately, they are often of the inner circle of our educational life,–to say that we are lacking in scholarship to a great degree, and that much of our so-called educational progress has been a tendency toward an accumulation of superficial information rather than a training of the intellect for power. The absolute need of the distinction between education for information and for power has been coming home to us. Above all, we have felt that we were not a little deceived by appearances in education and so are more ready to listen to suggestions of various kinds.

Under these circumstances it has seemed to me, that a calling of attention to what was accomplished at certain long-past periods for education, would not only be of interest as information for teachers, but might possibly be helpful or at least suggestive, in the midst of the somewhat disordered state of mind that has resulted from recent criticisms of our educational methods and success, by men whose interest in education cannot be doubted and whose opportunities for knowing are the best. For we are in a time when nearly every important educator, president of a university, dean of a department, old-time teacher or old, thoughtful pupil with the interest of Alma Mater at heart, who has had something to say with regard to education has said it in rather derogatory fashion. Perhaps, then, it will do us good to study the periods of the past and see what they did, how their methods differed or still more often were like our own, what their success was like and what we may learn from them. The surprising thing is the number of repetitions of present-day experiences in education that we shall find in the past. This is true, however, in every mode of thinking quite as well as in education, once careful investigation of conditions is made.

If we begin at the beginning and take what is sometimes called the oldest book in the world, we shall see how early definite educational ideas took form. It is a set of moral lessons or instructions given, or supposed to be given, by a father to his son. The father's name was Ptah Hotep. He was a vizier of King Itosi of the Fifth Dynasty in Egypt, some time about 3500 B.C. The Egyptologists used to date him earlier than that, but in recent years they have been clipping centuries off Egyptian dates until perhaps King Itosi must be considered as having lived probably not earlier than 3350 B.C. That makes very little difference for our purpose, however. The oldest manuscript copy of the book was written apparently not later than 2900 b.c. It exists as the famous Prisse Papyrus in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. There is another copy in the British Museum. There is a pretty thorough agreement as to these dates, so that we can be sure that this little book which has come to be known as the Instruction of Ptah Hotep, or the Proverbs of Ptah Hotpu–another form of his name with a variation in the title–represents the wisdom of the generations who lived in Egypt about 5000 years ago. It was written, as I have said, almost as long before Solomon as Solomon is before us, so that the character of the moral instructions which it contains is extremely interesting.

There must have been a number of copies of it made. This and books like it were used as schoolbooks in Egypt. They were employed somewhat as we employ copybooks. The writing of the manuscript is the old hieratic, cursive writing of the Egyptians, not their hieroglyphics, and the children used portions of this book as copies, listened to dictation from it and learned to write the language by imitating it. Of books similar to it we have a number of manuscript copies. Some of these copies preserved from before 2000 B.C. are full of errors such as school children would make in taking down dictation. This was their method of teaching spelling, and after the children had spelled the words the teacher went over them and corrected the mistakes. These corrections were made in a different colored ink from that used by the pupils! The whole system of teaching, as it thus comes before us, resembles our own elementary school teaching much more than we might think possible. Spelling, writing, composition are all taught in this way yet, or at least they were when I was at school, and while I have heard that some of the old-fashioned methods were going out, I have also received some hints of the reaction by which they are coming in again, so that the Egyptian methods take on a new interest.

Perhaps there is no more interesting feature of the education of that olden time than the fact that these books which were used as copybooks in the school contain moral lessons. We have been neglecting these in our schools and have come to recognize the danger of such neglect. Definite efforts at the organization of moral teaching in some form are being made by many teachers, and their necessity is recognized by all educators. All of these old Egyptian books, then, will have a special claim on our interest at the present time. Above all, the oldest of them, though it is literally the oldest book in the world, merits our attention, because its moral teaching is very clear-cut and its emphasis on ethical precepts very pronounced.

We would be very prone to think that what an old father has to say to his boy over fifty centuries ago would have, at most, only an antiquarian interest for us. It is not easy even to imagine that the old gentleman could have known human nature so well and written from so close to the heart of humanity because of his love for his boy, that his words would always have a practical application in life. Such, however, is actually the case. Any father of the modern time would be proud to be able to give to his boy the eminently practical maxims that this old father has written down. If there is any advice that will be helpful for youth, for the young usually demand that they shall have their own experience and not take it at second hand, this is the advice that is of value. Only fools, it is said, learn by their own experience, but then there is good Scripture warrant for believing that they were not all wise men in the olden time, and we are pretty well agreed that all the fools are not dead yet. If advice can be of service, however, from one generation to another, then here is the wisdom of age for the inexperience of youth. At least it will serve after the event to show youth that it was properly warned and that it is entirely its own fault if it has been making a fool of itself–as other generations have done before.

It might be expected that at least in form these old-time maxims would be rude and crude, expressed with an old man's loquaciousness and with many personal foibles. Fortunately for us, while to his son Ptah Hotep was very probably an old man, he was not what most of us would call old. In Egypt they married comparatively young. This boy was probably the oldest son. It is usually for the oldest that such advice is treasured up and written out. The father then, giving his advice just as his son was leaving the paternal household when he had married a wife and was about to set up a home of his own, was probably not more than forty. To seventeen or eighteen, forty is quite ancient. To most of the rest of us it is entirely too young to be trusted absolutely in serious matters. Aristotle declared that a man's body reaches physical perfection at thirty-five and his mind reaches intellectual maturity at forty-nine. His students were inclined to think that this age was entirely too old, his philosophic contemporaries of his own generation and the members of national academies and learned societies of most of the generations since, have been quite sure that the term set was entirely too young.

Ptah Hotep's son, then, very probably looked on his father as most sons under twenty are prone to do, as a dear old-fashioned gentleman (he does not like to use the word old fogy for his father, reserving it for the fathers of others), who would be quite tolerable if he only had a little more sympathy with the wonderful advance that is in the world in this new generation. The real young man of the time, however, was the father who wrote his maxims, the condensed wisdom of his experience of life, with a directness, an absolute clarity, an occasional appeal to figures of speech and a variety of expression so striking as to make his work literature. As such it has come down to us. It is eminently human in every way, and while there is here and there an unfortunate tendency to repeat words of similar sound and different meaning, after the fashion of what we call punning, this is pardonable enough since so many of our friends indulge in it and give us practice in pardoning, while, on the whole, the old man wrote as wisely as Polonius, and in a style not quite as artificial as that which Shakespeare has invented as suitable to the old Danish Prime Minister, whom the ancient vizier of Egypt recalls so vividly in many ways.

No idea is probably more ingrained in modern thinking, no opinion is more generally accepted, no conclusion is surer to most people, than that we are in the midst of marvellous progress in this little world of ours, and that our generation is somewhere at the apex of the Pyramid of Progress, elevated thereto by the attainments of the generations that have preceded us. As the Poet Laureate put it at the close of the nineteenth century, "we are the heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time"; and because we have the advantage of our predecessors' progress in their time, we are, of course, in all that makes for human happiness and fulness of life, very far ahead of those gone before us. The farther back we go in history, then, the lower down men are supposed to be found in all that stands for intellectuality and in all that represents the possibilities of human achievement at its best. It is now well understood that the generations of the past are not so much to be blamed for their backwardness as to be pitied for the misfortune that, having come earlier in the world's history, they could not have the advantages that we enjoy, and therefore could only attain much lower stages in human progress than ours.

Apparently, there are very few people who do not share in the opinions thus expressed. The nineteenth century has been proclaimed the century of evolution; and the idea of evolution has become so much a part of the thought of our time that man also is assumed to be in the midst of it, and history is presumed to show distinctly the wonderful advance that humanity has made. As a matter of fact, it is extremely difficult to point out definitely where progress in humanity may be observed. Ambassador Bryce was asked, two years ago, to deliver an address before Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, and took for his subject "What is Progress?" Phi Beta Kappa is the fraternity that admits into its classes only the best students,–men who have proved their ability by success. Mr. Bryce, speaking to the most intelligent university graduates, might be expected to make much of our wonderful recent progress. The address subsequently appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1907. Far from any glorification of progress, the historian of the American Commonwealth, who has demonstrated his breadth of view and his notable lack of British insularity by the large way he has written about us, so that we have adopted his work as a text-book of information about ourselves, is very dubious as to whether there is any progress in the world. There is certainly no progress in man's highest expressions of his intelligence. As Mr. Bryce says: "The poetry of the early Hebrews and of the early Greeks has never been surpassed and hardly ever equalled. Neither has the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, nor the speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero." No one pretends that there is any progress in art. The masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, and painting date as a rule from long before our time, some of them nearly twenty-five hundred years back.

As has been very well said, the man who talks much about progress in our time usually knows only the history of human thought in his own generation, and not very much about that. In nearly every important phase of human achievement, we are, in present accomplishment, far behind the great predecessors. In our generation, we are confessedly imitators in every phase of aesthetic expression. In painting, sculpture, art and literature, our models are all in the past, and we are quite frank in confessing that we are doing no work at all so good as the work of our forefathers of many generations and sometimes many centuries ago. Whence, then, comes the idea of progress? It has obtained most of its vogue from the theory of evolution; and the lack of evidence for evolution in general, in spite of the persuasion on the part of many educated people that there are proofs for it, can be very well judged from the corresponding lack of evidence with regard to progress in humanity. There is complete absence of proof for this latter, when the situation with regard to human achievement in the really great things of human life is examined. Indeed, it would be amusing were it not amazing to think how readily we have come to accept notions for which there is so little substantiation. To many this will doubtless seem a surprising declaration to make, after all that has been written, and universally accepted as most people think, with regard to evolution by the great minds of the nineteenth century. What evolution means, however, is summed up in the theory of descent, that is that living things as we know them now, have all come from simpler forms and perhaps all from a single form. The only other phase of interest in evolution is what concerns the theory of natural selection, which is supposed by many people to have been demonstrated in the nineteenth century. It may be well for those who think thus to have recalled to them what a recent writer on the subject, himself a distinguished investigator in biology, a professor at Leland Stanford University, where under the influence of President Jordan biology is thoroughly yet conservatively cultivated, has to say with regard to these theories and the objective evidence for them. Professor Vernon L. Kellogg in his "Darwinism To-day,"2 p. 18, though himself an evolutionist and a Darwinian, says: "What may for the moment detain us, however, is a reference to the curiously almost completely subjective character of the evidence for both the theory of descent and natural selection. Biology has been until now a science of observation; it is beginning to be one of observation plus experiment. The evidence for its principal theories might be expected to be thoroughly objective in character; to be of the nature of positive, observed and perhaps experimentally proved, facts. How is it actually? Speaking by and large, we only tell the general truth when we declare that no indubitable cases of species forming or transforming, that is of descent, have been observed; and that no recognized case of natural selection really selecting has been observed. I hasten to repeat the names of the Ancon sheep, the Paraguay cattle, the Porto Santo rabbit, the Artemias of Schmankewitch and the de Vriesian evening primroses to show that I know my list of classic possible exceptions to this denial of observed species forming, and to refer to Weldon's broad-and-narrow fronted crabs as a case of what may be an observation of selection at work. But such a list, even if it could be extended to a score, or to a hundred, of cases, is ludicrous as objective proof of that descent and selection, under whose domination the forming of millions of species is supposed to have occurred." (Italics mine.)