THE SIMPLE AND EFFECTIVE CURRICULUM. The simplicity of the curriculum was one of its marked features. In a manner seldom witnessed in the world's educational history, the Greeks used their religion, literature, government, and the natural activities of young men to impart an education of wonderful effectiveness. [22] The subjects we have valued so highly for training were to them unknown. They taught no arithmetic or grammar, no science, no drawing, no higher mathematics, and no foreign tongue. Music, the literature and religion of their own people, careful physical training, and instruction in the duties and practices of citizenship constituted the entire curriculum. It was an education by doing; not one of learning from books. That it was an attractive type of education there is abundant testimony by the Greeks themselves. We have not as yet come to value physical education as did the Greeks, nor are we nearly so successful in our moral education, despite the aid of the Christian religion which they did not know. It was, to be sure, class education, and limited to but a small fraction of the total population. In it girls had no share. There were many features of Greek life, too, that are repugnant to modern conceptions. Yet, despite these limitations, the old education of Athens still stands as one of the most successful in its results of any system of education which has been evolved in the history of the world. Considering its time and place in the history of the world and that it was a development for which there were nowhere any precedents, it represented a very wonderful evolution. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Why are imaginative ability and many-sided natures such valuable characteristics for any people? 2. Why is the ability to make progressive changes, possessed so markedly by the Athenian Greeks, an important personal or racial characteristic? 3. Are the Athenian characteristics, stated in the middle of page 19, characteristics capable of development by training, or are they native, or both? 4. How do you explain the Greek failure to achieve political unity? 5. Would education for citizenship with us to-day possess the same defects as in ancient Greece? Why? Do we give an equivalent training? 6. Which is the better attitude for a nation to assume toward the foreigner--the Greek, or the American? Why? 7. Why does a state military socialism, such as prevailed at Sparta, tend to produce a people of mediocre intellectual capacity? 8. How do you account for the Athenian State leaving literary and musical education to private initiative, but supporting state _gymnasia_? 9. Would the Athenian method of instruction have been possible had all children in the State been given an education? Why? 10. How did the education of an Athenian girl differ from that of a girl in the early American colonies? 11. Why did the Greek boy need three teachers, whereas the American boy is taught all and more by one primary teacher?