the former is to fail to reach the latter. Continuous readjustment, by small and almost imperceptible degrees, is the ideal at which the educator should aim. When this is not secured, the educational domain is liable to sudden and violent revolutions which are destructive of successful educative effort at the time they occur, however beneficial their results may be in the future.
But the relation of adjustment is not entirely one-sided. The tone of thought and feeling and the direction of will induced by education necessarily affect the common ideals of the next generation, and may make them better or worse than those of the present. Hence, the educator must not blindly accept all current views of life, but rather select the highest. For the average thought of every community is obviously below its best thought; and may, in some points at any rate, be lower than the best thought of a past age. While, then, all true education must be in direct relation with the culture of its age and country, yet, especially on the ethical side, it should aim at transcending the average thought and tone.
Still more does this imply that education strives to transcend the present condition of the educated by making their life more rational, more volitional, and more attracted by goodness and beauty than it would otherwise be. It can never be a passive watching of the child’s development. No more fundamental error can be made than the assumption that education can be determined wholly, or even mainly, by the tendencies and impulses with which a child is endowed. Its real guiding principle must be a conception of the nature to which the child may attain, not a knowledge of that with which it starts. The educator studies the original endowment of the child and the early stages in the development of that innate nature in order that he may, wisely and successfully, employ appropriate means to direct further development and to accelerate its progress towards a more rational, complete and worthy life; not that he may the more skilfully give facilities to the child to drift about on the unregulated currents of caprice.
Such considerations show the importance of an insight into the theory of education on the part of all who are practically concerned with its direction. But the theory required is no system of abstract ideas ignoring the real concrete conditions of the life for which the actual education it is to guide is a preparation. To approach the subject only from the standpoint of the mental sciences which underlie it is to run the risk of setting up such a body of abstractions, whose relation to real life is neither very close nor very direct. The most profitable way of developing an educational theory for the present is to trace how in the past education has consciously adapted itself, more or less truly and fully, to the conditions of culture and social life; and by analysis to discover the reasons for comparative success or failure in the degree of clearness with which the end to be sought was apprehended and the nature of the children to be trained was understood.
In all ages the claims of the individual and those of the community have struggled for the mastery as the ultimate principles of life. As one or the other has prevailed the conception of education has emphasized social service or individual success as the primary end. The true harmony of human life will only be attained when these two impulses, contradictory on their own level, are united in a higher synthesis which sees each as the complement of the other in a life whose purpose is neither simple egoism nor pure altruism. Until that conception of life is attained and held generally there can be no sure and universally accepted conception of the aim and function of education. Much of the interest of the history of education[1] turns on the relation of these two principles as determinants of its aim.
In ancient Greece the supremacy of the state was generally unquestioned, and, especially in the earlier times, the good man was identified with the good citizen. No doubt, in later days philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, saw clearly that the round of the duties of citizenship did not exhaust the life of the individual. With them Old Greek education.the highest life was one of cultured leisure in which the energies were mainly concentrated on the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. But this “diagogic” life was only for the select few; for the undistinguished many the fulfilment by each of the duties of his station remained the measure of worthy life, though such duties were regarded as affecting the individual and private relations of the citizens in a much more intimate way than in former and ruder ages. And for those who devoted their lives to the highest culture, the essential preliminary condition was the existence of such a state as would form the most favourable environment for their pursuits and the most stable foundation for their leisured life. Thus Greek thought was saturated with the conception of life as essentially a set of relations between the individual and the city-state of which he formed an integral part. The first aim of education was therefore to train the young as citizens.
This training must, of necessity, be of a specific kind; for, like other small communities, the Greek city-states showed a life fundamentally one in conception, under various specific forms. Each state had its special character, and to this character the education given in it must conform if it were to be an effective instrument for training the citizens. From these fundamental conceptions flowed the demands of Plato and Aristotle that education should be regulated in all its details by the state authority, should be compulsory on all free citizens, and should be uniform—at any rate in its earlier stages—for all. In the Republic and the Laws, Plato shows to what extreme lengths theory may go when it neglects to take account of some of the most pertinent facts of life. For the guardian-citizens of the ideal state family life and family ties are abolished; no lower community is to be allowed to enter into competition with the state. Aristotle, indeed, did not go to these extreme lengths; he allowed the family to remain, but he seems to have regarded it as likely to affect children more for evil than for good.
In the essential principles laid down by both philosophers as to the relation of the state to education, and in the corollaries they drew from that relation, they were not at variance with the accepted Greek theory on the subject. It is true that the actual practice of Greek states departed, and often widely, from this ideal, for, especially in later centuries, the Greek always tended to live his own life. The nearest approach to the theory was found in Sparta, where the end of the state as a military organization was kept steadily in view, and where, after early childhood, the young citizens were trained directly by the state in a kind of barrack life—the boys to become warriors, the girls the mothers of warriors. It was this feature of Spartan education, together with the rude simplicity of life it enforced, which attracted Plato, and, to a less extent, Aristotle. In Athens there had of old been state laws insisting on the attendance of the children of the free citizens at school, and, in some degree, regulating the schools themselves. But at the time of Plato these had fallen into desuetude, and the state directly concerned itself only with the training of the ephebi, for which, we learn from Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, somewhat elaborate provisions were made by the appointment of officers, and the regulation of both intellectual and physical pursuits. For children and youths under the ephebic age there was no practical regulation of schools or palaestra by the state. Yet there is no doubt that the education really given was in conformity with Athenian ideals of culture and life, and that it was generally received by the children of free citizens, though of course the sons of the wealthy, then as now, could and did continue their attendance at school to a later age than their poorer brethren. The education of girls was essentially a domestic training. What Plato and Aristotle, with the theorist’s love of official systematic regulation, regarded as the greatest defect of Athenian education was in reality its strongest point. In practice, the harmony between individual liberty and social claims was much more nearly attained under a system of free working out of common thoughts and ideals than would have been the case under one of the irresistible imposition from without of a rigid mould.
The instruments of education everywhere found to be in
