Part 4 (1/2)

OUR DEBT TO hellAS As a political power the Greek States left the world nothing of importance As a people they were too individualistic, and seee inability to unite for political purposes To the neer slowly for to the ard--Rome--was left the important task, which the Greek people were never able to acco civilization into one political whole The world conquest that Greece made was intellectual As a result, her contribution to civilization was artistic, literary, philosophical, and scientific, but not political The Athenian Greeks were a highly artistic and iinative rather than a practical people They spent their energy on other overnment and conquest As a result the world will be forever indebted to them for an art and a literature of incomparable beauty and richness which still charms mankind; a philosophy which deeply influenced the early Christian religion, and has ever since tinged the thinking of the western world; and for e which were lost for ages to a world that had no interest in or use for science So deeply has our whole western civilization been tinctured by Greek thought that one enthusiastic writer has exclai in” [14] (R

11)

In education proper the old Athenian education offers us many lessons of importance that we of to-day may well heed In the emphasis they placed on moral worth, education of the body as well as the s, they were much ahead of us Their schools became a type for the cities of the entire Mediterranean world, being found from the Black Sea south to the Persian Gulf and ard to Spain When Rome became a world empire the Greek school system was adopted, and in hout the provinces, while the universities of the Greek cities for long furnished the highest form of education for ambitious Rohout the Mediterranean world The higher learning of the Greeks, preserved first at Athens and Alexandria, and later at Constantinople, was finally handed back to the western world at the ti, after Europe had in part recovered froe which followed the downfall of Rome

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1 Try to picture what ht have been the result for western civilization had the small and newly-developed democratic civilization of Greece been crushed by the Persians at the tireat political, commercial, and intellectual expansion usually subject old systems of morality and education to severe strain?

Illustrate

3 Why was the change in the type of Athenian education during the Ephebic years a natural and even a necessary one for the new Athens?

4 Do you understand that the syste before the Ephebic years was also seriously changed, or was the change largely a re-shaping and extension of the education of youths after sixteen?

5 Were the Sophists a good addition to the Athenian instructing force, or not? Why?

6 How may a State establish a corrective for such a flood of individualism as overwhelmed Greece, and still allow individual educational initiative and progress?

7 Do we as a nation face danger froed in the past? How is our problem like and unlike that of Athens after the Peloponnesian War?

8 What is the place in Greek life and thought of the ideal treatises on education written by Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle, after the flood of individualism had set in?

9 In as the conquest of Alexander good for world civilization?

10 Of what importance is it, in the history of our western civilization, that Greek thought had so thoroughly permeated the eastern Mediterranean world before Roion?

11 Picture for yourself the great intellectual advances of the Greeks by contrasting the tribal preparedness-type of education of the early Greek States and the learning possessed by the scholars of the University at Alexandria

12 Cohout the eastern Mediterranean world, following the conquests of Alexander, with the spread of the English language and ideas as to governhout the modern world

SELECTED READINGS

In the acco selections are reproduced:

7 Wilkins: Athens in the Time of Pericles

8 Isocrates: The Instruction of the Sophists

9 Xenophon: An Exa

10 Draper: The Schools of Alexandria

11 Butcher: What e to Greece

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS

1 Characterize the many educational influences of Athens, as pictured by Wilkins (7)

2 Were the evils of the Sophist teachers, which Isocrates points out (8), natural ones? Co to-day

3 What would be necessary for the proper training of one for eloquence?