The History of Education: Educational Practice and Progress Considered as a Phase of the Development and Spread of Western CivilizationCubberley, Ellwood Patterson
History
The History of Education: Educational Practice and Progress Considered as a Phase of the Development and Spread of Western Civilization
Cubberley, Ellwood Patterson
Education -- History
After the destruction of Jerusalem (70 A.D.) and the scatterment of the
people, the school instruction was naturally more or less disrupted, but
in one way or another the Hebrew people have ever since managed to keep up
the training of rabbis and the instruction of the young in the Law and the
traditions of their people, and as a consequence of this instruction we
have to-day the interesting result of a homogeneous people who, for over
eighteen centuries, have had no national existence, and who have been
scattered and persecuted as have no other people. History offers us no
better example of the salvation of a people by means of the compulsory
education of all.
THE NEW CHRISTIAN FAITH. It was into this Hebrew race that Jesus was born,
[6] and there he lived, learned, taught, made his disciples, and was
crucified. Building on the old Hebrew moral law and the importance of the
personal life, Jesus made his appeal to the individual, and sought the
moral regeneration of society through the moral regeneration of individual
men and women. This idea of individuality and of personal souls worth
saving was a new idea in a world where the submergence of the individual
in the State had everywhere up to that time been the rule. Even the
Hebrews, in their great desire to perpetuate their race and faith, had
suppressed and absorbed the individual in their religious State. The
teachings of Jesus, on the other hand, with their emphasis on charity,
sympathy, self-sacrifice, and the brotherhood of all men, tended to
obliterate nationality, while the emphasis they gave to the future life,
for which life here was but a preparation, tended to subordinate the
interests of the State and withdraw the concern of men from worldly
affairs. In a series of simple sermons, Jesus set forth the basis of this
new faith which he, and after him his disciples, offered to the world.
At the time of his crucifixion his disciples numbered scarcely one hundred
persons. For some years after his death his disciples remained in
Jerusalem, preaching that he was the Messiah or Christ, whom the Hebrew
people had long expected, and making converts to the idea. Later in
Samaria, Damascus, and Antioch they made additional converts among the
Jews. Up to this point the Christians had been careful to keep up all the
old Jewish customs, and it was even doubted at first whether any but Jews
could properly be admitted to the new faith. A new convert, Saul of
Tarsus, a Jew who had studied in the Greek university there and who
afterwards became the Apostle Paul, did much to open the new faith to the
Gentiles, as the men of other nations were known. Speaking Greek, and
being versed in Greek philosophy, and especially Stoicism, he gave thirty
years of most effective service to the establishment of Christian churches
[7] in Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece (R. 29), and Italy (R. 28). His work
was so important that he has often been called the second founder of the
Christian Church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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