Education: How Old The New. James Joseph Walsh
in human progress and not to deceive ourselves with the idea that because we are doing something that immediately preceding generations knew nothing of, therefore we are doing something that never was done in the world before. This is particularly important for us now, for in my estimation the eighteenth was one of the lowest of centuries in human accomplishment, and therefore we may easily deceive ourselves as to our place in human history in this century.
Reflections of this kind are, it seems to me, particularly important for educators, especially in the midst of our tendency to accept evolution unthinkingly in this generation. Man's skull has not changed, his body has not been modified, his soft tissues are the same as they used to be. His brain is no different. Why, then, should he not have done things in the olden time just about as he does them now? We do not think that acquired characters are inherited. Oliver Wendell Holmes talks of Emerson as the seventh generation of an academic family, but there are none of us who think that this made it any easier for Emerson to acquire an education, or gave him a better development of mind. Those of us who have experience in education know that the descendant of a family of peasants for centuries or of farmers for many generations, easily outstrips some of the scions of academic families in intellect. It is the man that counts and not his descent.
Just this is true of generations as well as of individuals. Whenever men have set themselves to doing things they have accomplished about as good results at any time in history as at any other. We apparently do not benefit by the accumulation of the experience of our predecessors. At least we can find no trace of that in history. For a certain number of enterprising generations there is manifest upward progress. Then something always happens to disturb the succession of ideas, sometimes it is nothing more than an over-refinement that leads to bad taste, and decadence takes the place of progress. The accomplishment of any particular generation, then, depends not on its place in any real or fancied scheme of evolution, but on its own ideals and its determined efforts to achieve them.
There are people who insist that this doctrine is pessimistic and discouraging and that, if we do not keep before men the consoling feeling that they are advancing beyond their forebears, there is not the same incentive to work as there would be under other circumstances. On the contrary, as it seems to me, this other idea that everything depends on ourselves and not on our predecessors, constitutes the highest form of incentive. We at the present time are far below many preceding generations in art, literature, architecture, arts and crafts and many developments of taste. Here is no evolution, but the story of how each generation sets itself to work. Why, then, should we think that in education, one of the highest of the arts, the moulding of the human mind into beautiful shapes instead of the moulding of more plastic material, we should be far ahead of the past and, therefore, in a position to find no precious lessons in it? The history of education not alone of the last three centuries of education, but of at least 6,000 years of education, is worth while knowing and it magnificently exemplifies how old is the new in education.
THE FIRST MODERN UNIVERSITY
"What is it that hath been? The same thing that shall be. What is it that hath been done? The same that shall be done." –Ecclesiastes i:10.
"To one small people . . . it was given to create the principle of Progress. That people was the Greek. Except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin." –Maine.
THE FIRST MODERN UNIVERSITY 6
We are very prone to think that our universities represent new developments in the history of humanity. We are aware that there were great educational institutions in the world at many times before the present, and that some of them profoundly affected the intellectual life of their time; we are likely to think, however, that these institutions were very different from our modern universities. They were not so well organized, they lacked endowments, their departments were not co-ordinated, they did not have the libraries and, of course, not the laboratory facilities that our modern universities have, and then, above all, they did not devote themselves to that one department of knowledge, physical science, in which absolute truth can be reached, and in which each advance in knowledge as made can be chronicled and set down as a sure basis for future work and workers in the same line for all time. The older institutions of learning were given up to speculation, to idealism, to metaphysics, and, of course, therefore, their work, as many educated people are now prone to look at it, was too shadowy to last, too cloudy to serve as a foundation for any enduring scientific knowledge. I do not think that I exaggerate when I make this as the statement of the thought of a good many people of our time who are at least supposed to be educated and who consider that they are reasonably familiar with the educational institutions of the past.
It has seemed to me, then, that it would be interesting and opportune to trace the origin, the development and the accomplishments of the first institution of learning that is very similar to our own; and to retrace some of the achievements of its professors, the circumstances in which they were done and the conditions surrounding an ancient school which I think our study will make clear as well deserving of the title of the first modern university. This was not the collection of schools at Athens, though there is no doubt at all that great intellectual and educational work was accomplished there, but not in our modern university sense. The schools were independent, and while the rivalry engendered by this undoubtedly did good so long as genius ruled in the schools, it brought about a degeneration into sophistry, from here comes the word, and argumentativeness, once the great master had been displaced by disciples who were sure that they knew their master's mind, and probably thought, as disciples always do, that they were going beyond their master, but who really occupied themselves with curious and trifling tergiversations of mind within the narrow circle of ideas laid down by the master,–as has nearly always been the case.
The first modern university was that of Alexandria. It was quite as much under Greek influence as the schools of Athens. There have been commentators on the story of Cleopatra, who have suggested that her African cast of countenance did not prove a deterrent to her success as a conqueror of hearts, and who argue from this to the fact that it is not physical charm but personality that counts in woman's power over men, quite forgetting, if they ever knew, that Cleopatra was a Greek of the Greeks, a daughter of the line of the Ptolemys, probably a direct descendant though with the bar sinister of Philip of Macedon, born of a house so watchful over its Greek blood and so resentful of any possible admixture of anything less noble with itself, that for generations it had been the custom for brother to marry sister, in order that the race of the Ptolemys might be perpetuated in absolute purity. Alexandria, while a cosmopolitan city in the inhabitants who dwelt in it and in the wide diffusion of commercial interests that centred there as a mart for East and West, was absolutely ruled by Greeks and represents for many centuries after the decline of Athens had come, the brightest focus of Greek intellectual life, Greek culture and art, Greek letters and education and every phase of that Greek influence in aesthetics which has always meant so much in the world's history.
The interesting fact about Alexandria in the history of education, is that it was the home of a modern university in every sense of that term, having particularly the features that many people are prone to think of as representing modern evolution in education. The buildings of the university were erected practically by a legacy left by the great Conqueror himself, Alexander. The central point of interest in the university was a great library, the nucleus of which was the library of Aristotle, tutor of Alexander, which had been collected with the help of that great Conqueror and was the finest collection of books in the world of that time. The main subject of interest in the university was physical science and its sister subject mathematics, which raises mere nature-study into the realm of science, and this scientific physical education was conducted in connection with the great museum or collection of objects of interest to scientists that had also been made partly by Aristotle himself and partly for his loved tutor by the gratitude of Alexander during his conquering expeditions in the far East. Finally professors were attracted to Alexandria by the offer of a better salary than had ever been paid at educational institutions before this, and by the additional offer of a palace to live in, supplied by the ruler of the country. It is no wonder, then, that in attendance also, as well as in the prestige of its professors, Alexandria resembled a modern
The material for this address was gathered for lectures on the History of Education at St. Mary's Seminary, Scranton, Pa., and St. Joseph's College, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. It was largely added to for the introductory lecture in a course to the teachers of the parochial schools of Philadelphia, March, 1910. Very nearly in its present form it was delivered before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences as the second lecture in the course on "How Old The New Is," April, 1910.