To the Greeks we are indebted for the earliest germ of the University.
It was with them chiefly that education took that great leap, the
greatest ever made, from the traditional teaching of the home, the shop,
the social surroundings, to schoolmaster teaching properly so called.
Nowadays, we, schoolmasters, think so much of ourselves, that we do not
make full allowance for that other teaching, which was, for unknown
ages, the only teaching of mankind. The Greeks were the first to
introduce, not perhaps the primary schoolmaster, for the R's, but
certainly the secondary or higher schoolmaster, known as Rhetorician or
Sophist, who taught the higher professions; while their Philosophers or
wise men, introduced a kind of knowledge that gave scope to the
intellectual faculties, with or without professional applications; the
very idea of our Faculty of Arts.
So self-asserting were these new-born teachers of the Sophist class,
that Plato thought it necessary to recall attention to the good old
perennial source of instruction, the home, the trade, and the society.
He pointed out that the pretenders to teach virtue by moral lecturing,
were as yet completely outrivalled by the influence of the family and
the social pressure of the community. In like manner, the arts of life
were all originally handed down by apprenticeship and imitation. The
greatest statesmen and generals of early times had simply the education
of the actual work. Philip of Macedon could have had no other teaching;
his greater son was the first of the line to receive what we may call
a liberal, or a general education, under the educator of all Europe.
[LOGIC IN THE MIDDLE AGES.]
THE MIDDLE AGE AND BOETHIUS.
I must skip eight centuries, to introduce the man that linked the
ancient and the modern world, and was almost the sole luminary in the
west during the dark ages, namely, Boethius, minister of the Gothic
Emperor Theodoric. As much of Aristotle as was known between the 6th and
the 11th centuries was handed down by him. During that time, only the
logical treatises existed among the Latins; and of these the best parts
were neglected. Historical importance attaches to a small circle of them
known as the Old Logic (_vectus logica_), which were the pabulum of
abstract thought for five dreary centuries. These consisted of the two
treatises or chapters of Aristotle called the "Categories," and the "De
Interpretatione," or the Theory of Propositions; and of a book of
Porphyry the Neo-Platonist, entitled 'Introduction' (_Isagoge_), and
treating of the so-called Five Predicables. A hundred average pages
would include them all; and three weeks would suffice to master them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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