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Oriental educa

to the past.

mental culture or with preparation for real living. The brahmins have handed down considerable traditional learning, grammar, phonetics, rhetoric, logic, 'Arabic' notation, algebra, astronomy, and medicine, but new knowledge of any sort is barred. The Hindus still plow with sticks of wood, and their crops are harvested and threshed by devices equally primitive. They bake bricks, work metals, and weave cloth, but with the same kind of appliances that were used by their remote ancestors. Until recently, they have been greatly lacking in ambition, self-reliance, and personal responsibility, and have not yet come to any feeling of solidarity or national unity. To them prosperity and progress are foreign ideas. India as Typical of the Orient. The other countries tion in bondage of the ancient Orient never fixed their social classes in so hard and fast a manner, and have never included so elaborate a philosophy among the products of their culture. But India may well be considered broadly typical of the stage of development in the Orient. Certain common features appear in the education of all the nations there. In the system of each, the classes below the sacerdotal or priestly are given little intellectual education, and the women none at all, but both are trained by apprenticeship in their vocations. Actual schools, both elementary and higher, have been instituted; and the latter, except in China, are conducted at temples or priestly colleges by members of the sacerdotal class. The educational content is naturally traditional. It is, for the most part, ensured against change by being embalmed in sacred books, such as the Vedas. The educational method consists largely in the memorizing of the text and imitation of the copy set, and little attempt

[graphic]

Fig. 1.-Elders explaining to young men of an Australian tribe at the

'initiatory ceremonies.'

[merged small][graphic]

Fig. 2. A Hindu school in the open air, with the village schoolmaster teaching boys to write on a strip of palm leaf with an iron stylus. (Reproduced from Things as They Are by Amy Wilson-Carmichael, by permission of the Fleming H. Revell Company.)

is made to give a reason for the customs and traditional knowledge taught. Hence, while individuality has begun to emerge, it is suppressed by every agency possible; and, although these peoples have largely overcome the primitive enslavement to nature and the present, they are completely in bondage to the past.

Greater de

Jewish Education.-The Jews are classed among the nations of the Orient, but they formulated loftier aims and have exerted more influence upon modern ideals in education. While their theology greatly devel- velopment of personality, oped in the course of their history, from the first they held to an ethical conception of God, and the chief goal of their education was the building of moral and religious character. Not until after the Babylonish captivity (586-536 B. C.), however, did they establish actual schools. Before that, children were given an informal training in the traditions and observances of their religion by their parents. But they brought back from Babylon the idea of institutions for higher training and started such schools through their synagogues. In the second century B. C. the founding of elementary schools also began, and eventually the Jews made education well-nigh universal. The beneficial effect of this training is seen in the respect shown by the Jews for their women, their kind treatment of children, and their reverence for parents. The defects of their education appear in the stereotyped and formal way in which the religious material came to be interpreted, and the consequent hostility to science but Oriental and art, except as they threw light on some religious fes- and nontival or custom. Although appeal was made to various types of memory, systems of mnemonics devised, and other good pedagogical features suggested, their methods

progressive.

of instruction were largely memoriter. The Jewish system of education, as a whole, afforded a greater development of personality than that of the other Oriental nations, and through it have been spread some of the world's most exalted religious conceptions. Nevertheless, it did not depart much from its traditions and the past, and to this extent it may be classed with the training of the primitive tribes and of the Oriental nations as predominantly non-progressive.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

For general works, see Graves, F. P., History of Education before the Middle Ages (Macmillan, 1909), chaps. I-XI; Monroe, P., Text-book in the History of Education (Macmillan, 1905), chaps. I-II. A general interpretation of the evolution of education in savagery and barbarism is also given in Laurie, S. S., Pre-Christian Education (Longmans, Green, 1909), pp. 1-207; Morgan, L. H., Ancient Society (Holt, 1907), Part I; and Taylor, H. O., Ancient Ideals (Macmillan, 1913), vol. I, chaps. I-V. An illustration of primitive training of especial interest to American students is found in Spencer, F. C., Education of the Pueblo Child (Columbia University, Department of Philosophy and Psychology, vol. 7, no. 1); and a detailed description of the puberty rites of a variety of savage tribes, in Webster, H., Primitive Secret Societies, (Macmillan, 1908), chaps. I-V. A more complete account of the Hindu philosophy and education appears in Dutt, R. C., Civilization of India (Dent, London), and Taylor, H. O., Ancient Ideals (Macmillan, 1913), vol. I, chaps. III and IV. A systematic statement of the Jewish training has been adapted from a German work, in Leipziger, H. M., Education of the Jews (New York Teachers College, 1890), and a more detailed account worked out in Spiers, B., School System of the Talmud (Stock, London, 1898).

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