T. J. Haarhoff

“ Dull and uninteresting as their educational labours often were, they were often, like Browning’s Grammarian, possessed by a real love of learning. The pedestrian quality of the work—the jealous watching over the text of Vergil, the copying of manuscripts, the relentless monastic routine—was perhaps the best service that could have been rendered to humanity. What the world wanted, in view of the dark times that were to follow, was a tenacious watch-dog type of loyalty to letters, not the brilliant genius who needs somebody to look after his manuscripts. ”

“ History, in the hands of a skilful master, may become one of the very finest instruments of education. It has a legitimate use in inspiring patriotism. The deeds of a man’s ancestors become part of his individuality, and may be a source of high and noble action. Similarly, in proportion as a man realizes his national unity with his people, their history may become a motive and a driving force in his life. Now the Roman Empire set before the schoolboys of Africa and Italy and Gaul the events of the Roman republic and the deeds of the emperors. ”

“ Yet there is the spark which kept alive the flickering torch of learning in the dark ages, the interest in literature surviving material ruin. For, in spite of the crash of circumstances and although times are sad, there is a feeling that the mind, even when oppressed by misfortune, should keep unconquered its interest in education:
Invictum deceat studiis servare vigorem.
There is much of rude and rushing violence in this ‘barbarization’ of Gaul. ”

“ Thousands of ‘foreign’ elements have mingled to make them what they are, and unconsciously they daily absorb fresh elements that are ‘foreign’. But so far do they forget this, that sometimes pride, and the ignorance that is born of exclusiveness, lead them to impose their culture on others by force. Complex nationality, while it is in the making, means friction; but once that stage is passed the result is almost always a richer and better culture. So it was with Gaul. Her position as leader of the Roman Empire in education was undoubtedly due largely to her complexity. ”

“ But in spite of the extent and the fame of Gallic studies there come to us, every now and then, hints of decadence in education. The fourth-century Ammianus says that even the few homes in which the studious atmosphere of earlier days had survived were in his day given over to vanity. All they abound in is the trifling of sluggish idleness, while they resound with voices and the wind-borne tinkling of the lute. ”

“ It was an age, like our own, of transition, and we see education passing through the last stage of official paganism in the Western Empire, and entering into the Christian era. Movements and counter-movements (which have a considerable measure of modern interest) pass before our eyes. For behind the shifting scenes of Roman and Barbarian, Pagan and Christian, there is a continuity which reaches to the present day. That continuity is the immense fabric of Roman Education which passed through the Church into the Middle Ages, and shaped the thought and culture of modern nations. ”

“ Rhetoric, says Ennodius, is the only moulder of public opinion. Her charm is irresistible and universal. (Why mention so obvious a fact?) The opinion she creates is eternal. It is she who makes people believe whatever she wishes about the deeds of the brave, she who can suppress facts with impunity. She is the mother of poetry, jurisprudence, dialectic, arithmetic, and she gives them their value. ”

“ When the panegyric becomes fashionable in Gaul, we see how history develops into an instrument of imperial policy. Not merely beauty of form and the following of traditional rules, but the narrower purpose of praising the emperor becomes the goal. The facts of history are loosely and wildly used. ”

“ For even when we have a man like Ausonius who deals directly with education, the assumption always is that the reader is thoroughly familiar with the practical facts of the schools, and the aim is generally to impress by style or rhetorical device, and never to give a serious exposition. We must be content, therefore, to fill in the account with the known facts of Roman education.
We have no lively picture of the Gallic boy going to school, such as Lucian gives us in the case of Greece. But in our period we possess something similar in the orations of Libanius, the sophist of Antioch. ”

“ Higher education, therefore, hardly appears at all in the Christian writers. The former rhetorical school, with its declamations and its applause, fell away, though its influence survived. The rules of rhetoric may have been illustrated by examples which were applied in the pulpit, but there was no separate school for the art of speaking. Yet the germ of the modern university—as far as intellectual search for truth is concerned—was found in some of the monasteries, and there is at least one subject in which they had a contribution to make to higher education, philosophy. ”

“ To the curial, as he carried out the commands of the emperor, it must have been difficult to see any inspiring meaning in it all, when Gaul was day by day being more abandoned to the barbaric invasions, while the burden of taxation remained unalleviated. And yet it is where a meaning, an ideal, is most clearly seen, that education has its truest incentive and its most fruitful results.
Denk appeals to the fact that many Roman slaves could read and write, to Cato’s requirements of a household slave, and to Mommsen’s statement that there was much reading and writing among the lower classes. ”

“ The Christians used their rhetoric in a living cause, their dialectic to probe questions crowded with contemporary interest; their Livy and Sallust to develop a philosophy of history, their literature to understand and spread the cause of truth for which they had been martyred. The pagans, on the other hand, used their rhetoric for fictitious cases (falsas lites) , their dialectic for ingenious trifling, their history as the handmaid of rhetoric, their literature to imitate Cicero or Fronto or Pliny, to write freakish verses, or to flatter the emperor. ”

“ There the question of teaching Greek and Latin was not so acute as in South Africa, for Greek was dying out, and had no racial background, but the effects of a wrong handling of ‘the second language’ are as unmistakable and instructive. It is not time or place or circumstance that matters in educational method so much as psychology—a study that is only beginning to come into its heritage—and the psychology of the child is the same yesterday as to-day. ”

“ C’est l’idéal de l’École,’ and again, ‘les œuvres d’Homère étaient les premières livres qu’on mettait aux mains d’un enfant, qu’il fût Grec ou Romain.’
This is the point, ‘Greek or Roman’. Educational experience has shown that a school-system must be elastic and accommodate [230] itself to the psychology and the needs of the child. Wherever there have been bilingual countries the problem has arisen. What is educationally the soundest principle of manipulating the language question? At first it was thought that the language of the higher culture should be enforced on all. ”

“ There is no progress and creative genius: hardly any one wants to learn. It cannot be, he reflects, that the nature of the human mind changes: history testifies to the contrary. No, the truth is that there is no enthusiasm or application. ‘Nostro saeculo non ingenia deesse, sed studia.’ A mark of decadence is the barbarization of the Latin language. [1341] Barbarism and solecism are the tyrants that reign. ”

“ We to-day have largely lost the sense of beauty in speech. Language has become to us for the most part a matter of the written word. We have ceased to feel as vividly as Isocrates did in his letter to Philip [1371] the need of the living voice to express the soul of which the letters are the body. The artistic joy which is found in the form and arrangement of words, in the sound given to them by a dramatic speaker, in the gestures of an accomplished [251] orator—this joy has largely disappeared. Yet we feel that it was there in the Latin panegyrists. ”

“ Gaul raises the problem of complex nationality. The old Celtic population, overlaid with Roman civilization, penetrated by Germanic tribes—Goths, Franks, Burgundians—is about to enter on a new period of history, and the blending of these elements has an influence on education which is interesting. Nations, when they become great, are prone to emphasize the purity of their race and language. They exclude foreign words and customs whenever they can, they raise the boast of a pure and unique culture. ”

“ In Holland the growing Flemish Movement headed by Stijn Streuvels and others has compelled recognition; in Norway there is a similar movement; and in South Africa the Education Department is increasingly recognizing the use of Afrikaans in the schools. For the more education disregards the form of the language that lives in the hearts of the people, the less will it understand and be able to teach them effectively. In other words, an undue archaism means artificiality, means a wandering from the truth. ”

“ Light can dispel the darkness, however vast, in which the law involves a man, and this light by reading I can give. I am she from whom men await prosecution if guilty and acquittal if innocent ... for my gain the Roman keeps vigil throughout the Empire. Unless I adorn them, office, riches, honours lose their attraction: it is I who rule the rulers.’ [938] This is all very similar to what Isocrates had said centuries ago, when he talked of the power and benefits of Persuasion, [939] and the traditional moral note is there just as in Isocrates [940] and in Cicero. ”

“ When we find Rome tenaciously keeping for herself the teaching of law, and standardizing education by connecting the teachers directly with the emperor, it is because she realizes that the Latin language is the medium through which she rules, and that uniform obedience depends on her subjects uniformly understanding her commands. ”

“ Any learning I may have had in more youthful years is now the spoil of age, “omnia fert aetas”’—a Virgilian quotation to indicate that, in spite of his profession to his friend, his ‘studia litterarum’ still remain to mark his culture. The barbarism at issue is the quantity of the middle syllable of ‘potitur’, to which he devotes most of the letter.
Thus to the nobleman of the fifth century, even if he was a churchman and might, therefore, be expected to take the wider Christian view, culture meant something essentially Roman. ”

“ But we must ask what the Christian attitude was towards pagan education as a whole, for on this attitude largely depended the nature of the Christian schools.
Sulpicius Severus is uncompromisingly harsh. All literature except the Bible and theological writings are utterly vain. ‘For what did the pagan writers themselves gain by a literary glory that was to perish with their generation? Or what profit was it to posterity to read of Hector’s battles or Socrates’ philosophy? ”

“ In his theory of education Augustine allows pictures and statues and such-like to be used for instruction. But, except for strictly scientific purposes, they must be looked on as otiose: ‘hoc totum genus inter superflua hominum instituta numerandum est, nisi cum interest quid eorum, qua de causa, et ubi et quando et cuius auctoritate fiat.’ Cassiodorus expresses the view of the more liberal and enlightened Christian teachers when he sees that art may be used to improve the works of the ancients by avoiding their mistakes, to clothe the new in the glory of the old. ”