Bernardo Gallegos
Bernardo Gallegos Resources
Gallegos Page 1
Gallegos Page 2
Gallegos Page 3
Gallegos Page 4
Gallegos Page 5
Gallegos Page 6
Sitemap
|
Bernardo Gallegos
Page 03 - Part A
After the pupil had learned to
read, much attention was given to accentuation and articulation, in order
to secure beautiful reading. Still more, in reading or reciting, the parts
were acted out. The Greeks were a nation of actors, and the recitations in
the schools and the acting in the theaters gave plenty of opportunity for
expression. There were no schoolbooks, as we know them. The master
dictated and the pupils wrote down, or, not uncommonly, learned by heart
what the master dictated. Ink and parchment were now used, the boy making
his own schoolbooks. Homer was the first and the great reading book of the
Greeks, the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ being the Bible of the Greek people.
Then followed Hesiod, Theognis, the Greek poets, and the fables of Aesop.
[16] Reading, declamation, and music were closely interrelated. To appeal
to the emotions and to stir the will along moral and civic lines was a
fundamental purpose of the instruction (R. 5). A modern writer well
characterizes the ancient instruction in literature in the following
words:
By making the works of the great poets of the Greek people the material of
their education, the Athenians attained a variety of objects difficult of
attainment by any other one means. The fact is, the ancient poetry of
Greece, with its finished form, its heroic tales and characters, its
accounts of peoples far removed in time and space, its manliness and
pathos, its directness and simplicity, its piety and wisdom, its respect
for law and order, combined with its admiration for personal initiative
and worth, furnished, in the hands of a careful and genial teacher, a
material for a complete education such as could not well be matched even
in our own day. What instruction in ethics, politics, social life, and
manly bearing could not find a fitting vehicle in the Homeric poems, not
to speak of the geography, the grammar, the literary criticism, and the
history which the comprehension of them involved? Into what a wholesome,
unsentimental, free world did these poems introduce the imaginative Greek
boy! What splendid ideals of manhood and womanhood did they hold up for
his admiration and imitation! From Hesiod he would learn all that he
needed to know about his gods and their relation to him and his people.
From the elegiac poets he would derive a fund of political and social
wisdom, and an impetus to patriotism, which would go far to make him a
good man and a good citizen. From the iambic poets he would learn to
express with energy his indignation at meanness, feebleness, wrong, and
tyranny, while from the lyric poets he would learn the language suitable
to every genial feeling and impulse of the human heart. And in reciting or
singing all these, how would his power of terse, idiomatic expression, his
sense of poetic beauty and his ear for rhythm and music be developed! With
what a treasure of examples of every virtue and vice, and with what a fund
of epigrammatic expression would his memory be furnished! How familiar he
would be with the character and ideals of his nation, how deeply in
sympathy with them! And all this was possible even before the introduction
of letters. With this event a new era in education begins. The boy now not
only learns and declaims his Homer, and sings his Simonides or Sappho; he
learns also to write down their verses from dictation, and so at once to
read and to write. This, indeed, was the way in which these two (to us)
fundamental arts were acquired. As soon as the boy could trace with his
finger in sand, or scratch with a stylus on wax, the forms of the letters,
and combine them into syllables and words, he began to write poetry from
his master's dictation. The writing-lesson of to-day was the reading,
recitation, or singing-lesson of to-morrow. Every boy made his own reading
book, and, if he found it illegible, and stumbled in reading, he had only
himself to blame. The Greeks, and especially the Athenians, laid the
greatest stress on reading well, reciting well, and singing well, and the
youth who could not do all three was looked upon as uncultured. Nor could
he hide his want of culture, since young men were continually called upon,
both at home and at more or less public gatherings, to perform their part
in the social entertainment.
Source: THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION, by ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
[ Part A ]
[ Part B ]
[ Part C ]
[ Part D ]
[ Part E ]
[ Part F ]
|
