The Chautauquan, Vol. 03, December 1882: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Promotion of True Culture.; Organ of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific CircleChautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Religion
The Chautauquan, Vol. 03, December 1882: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Promotion of True Culture.; Organ of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Chautauqua Institution -- Periodicals; Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle -- Periodicals
In the other states of Greece, which were chiefly towns, or suburbs
of towns, the system of day schools was universal, and the boys went
to and from home under the charge of a special slave, chosen because
he was no longer fit for hard work. He was called the boy’s leader,
or pedagogue (_paidagogos_), a word which never meant schoolmaster
among the Greeks, though it is so rendered in our English Bible (Gal.
iii. 24). The discipline of boys was severe, and they were constantly
watched and repressed, nor were they allowed to frequent the crowded
market place. Corporal punishment was commonly applied to them, and
the quality most esteemed in boys was a blushing shyness and modesty,
hardly equalled by the girls of our time. Nevertheless Plato speaks
of the younger boys as the most sharp-witted, insubordinate, and
unmanageable of animals.
OF SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS.—It does not seem that the office of
schoolmaster was thought very honorable, except of course in Sparta,
where he was a sort of Minister of Education. It was, as with us, a
matter of private speculation, but controlled by police regulations
that the school should open and close with sunrise and sunset and
that no grown men should be allowed to go in and loiter there. The
infant-school teachers, who merely taught children their letters
(_grammatodidaskolos_), were of a low class in society, sometimes even
teaching in open air, like the old hedge schoolmasters in Ireland.
The more advanced teaching of reading and writing was done by the
_grammatikos_, whose house was called, like that of philosophers and
rhetoricians, _schole_, a place of leisure. For the physical and the
æsthetic side we have still to mention the trainer (_paidotribes_)
and the teacher of music (_kitharistes_), the former of whom taught
in the palæstra the exercises and sports afterward carried on by the
full-grown citizens in the gymnasia, which were a feature in all Greek
towns. The teachers of riper youth stood in social position above the
mere teachers of letters, but beneath the professors of rhetoric and
philosophy (sophists). These latter performed the functions of college
tutors at our universities, and completed the literary side of Greek
education. The fees paid to the various teachers were in proportion
to their social importance. Some of the sophists made great fortunes,
and exacted very high fees; the mere schoolmasters are spoken of as
receiving a miserable pittance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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