EDUCATION IN ANCIENT ROME
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Isocrates identified education’s primary purpose as preparing clear-thinking, rational, truthful, and honest statesmen. He held that rhetoric, the rational expression of thought, was crucial in educating leaders for the good of society. Rhetorical education should combine the arts and sciences with effective communication skills. Opposing the Sophists’ emphasis on public relations skills and manipulating an audience, Isocrates wanted orators to advocate social justice. Isocrates’s students, who attended his school for four years, studied rhetoric, political philosophy, history, and ethics. They analyzed and imitated model orations and practiced public speaking. Isocrates influenced the rhetorical tradition in Western education, especially the Roman educational theorist Quintilian.
3-5i The Greeks’ Significance in World Education The Greek significance in world education reaches to the present. The Athenian ideal of citizens’ civic participation became a principle in American democracy. Philosophy still begins with the ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Questions about the liberal arts and sciences and universal truth versus cultural relativism still resonate among educators today.
3-6 EDUCATION IN ANCIENT ROME Rome’s thousand-year history stands as one of the most remarkable achievements in Western civilization. Founded as a small Latin settlement on the Italian peninsula about 750 BCE, Roman society was divided into two classes: the dominant patrician elite and the subordinate plebeians. The Senate was Rome’s most powerful lawmaking body. Early Roman education sought to instill in children, especially the sons who would inherit the family property, reverence for their ancestors and a sense of duty to family, the state, and the gods. The father, in an ancient version of homeschooling, was responsible for teaching his children the mos maiorum, the valued traditions of Rome’s heritage. Along with prayers and rituals, he stressed the values of self-control, fear of the gods, temperance, frugality, courage, patriotism, and self-sacrifice. As Rome’s future defenders, the young males learned such military skills as fencing and javelin throwing. At age 16, the youth put on the toga virilis to begin his adult role. When Rome became a vast empire, its educational patterns changed. The city of Rome, the empire’s capitol, with more than 500,000 inhabitants, became the classical world’s greatest metropolis. The city’s material grandeur reflected the achievements of Roman administration and civil engineering. A network of aqueducts carried fresh drinking and bathing water to the inhabitants and its ports, and paved roads brought food and other products to its markets. Captives from Rome’s conquests of Greece, Gaul, Spain, and Asia Minor increased its slave population. Of Italy’s 7.5 million inhabitants, 3 million were slaves. While the majority of the slaves were agricultural laborers, they also worked as domestic servants, artisans, and craftsmen. In particular, educated Greek slaves were valued as tutors, teachers, and secretaries.40 Near the end of the fourth century BCE, a primary school, or ludus, appeared in Rome where boys from ages 7 through 12 learned to read and write Latin, their vernacular language. Primary schools, both ancient and modern, emphasized literacy, the ability to read and write, the students’ spoken language. The teacher was called a ludi magister or literator and was usually male, either free or a slave. The school, a private, for-profit institution, enrolled a minority of boys, mainly from wealthier classes. Boys were often led to school by a slave, called pedagogus, preferably an educated Greek slave who could act as a tutor. The English words “pedagogue,” an educator, and “pedagogy,” which refers to education, come from the Latin term pedagogus.
Chambers, Grew, Herlihy, Rabb, and Woloch, The Western Experience, pp. 132–133.
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