4
Introduction
It is important to keep in mind that early Christianity arose directly out of Judaism; at first it was regarded as just another Jewish sect. But Judaism, from about the third century BC, had been strongly influenced by Greek culture, especially language and philosophy. Later Christianity, including educational thought and practice, may be seen as a mixture of that Judaeo-Christian tradition and subsequent Graeco-Roman influences.
Background
For the Jews religion was part of their defence against foreign domination and oppression: theirs was a culture of a persecuted but chosen people. Their traditions told them that they had been led out of pagan Ur by Abraham who took them to Canaan. Later, the Old Testament contains a vivid description of the Israelites' captivity in Egypt, and their being rescued by Moses and given the law in the form of the ten commandments. If this happened, it probably took place in the thirteenth century BC. Later still, the Assyrians took over as the heathen oppressors: Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and began the 'Babylonian captivity' (the Jews were in exile from 586-536 BC). In the fourth century BC Alexander conquered Palestine; not only did the Jews remain subjugated, but in the second century BC Antiochus of Syria attempted to abolish Judaism and replace it with Greek ideas. This produced the famous revolt of the Maccabees in 168 BC. In 63 BC the Romans, led by Pompey, took Judea and made it part of the Roman Empire; from AD 66-70 there was a revolt against Rome, and, as a punishment, Emperor Titus ordered the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the expulsion of the Jews from their country.
Thus pre-Christian Jewish culture possessed a number of distinctive features. It was a nation frequently without a homeland; the Jews regarded themselves as superior, a chosen people, worshipping the one true God, Jehovah, and they were often persecuted for this. They derived many of their religious laws and customs from a sacred text, the Torah, which included the five books of Moses (the Pentateuch). A powerful aspect of their culture was the need to transmit sacred knowledge and practices to succeeding generations. It was a culture in which learning was greatly respected.
Jewish Culture and Christianity
The pre-Christian Jews had survived persecution by emphasising their 'differentness': they were chosen, they were monotheistic, they had distinctive values, partly derived from their prophets. The early Christians adopted some, but not all, of these values. The Jews had a sacred text; the Christians would later add their own, the New Testament. Education was inevitably connected with these authoritative texts. Religion permeated the whole of life, and religion was identified with morality in a way that was unknown to the Greeks and Romans.
Castle1makes much of the distinction between priests and prophets. The priest represented organised religion, controlling ritual and worship; his influence was conservative - looking back to better days - and his function was to preserve existing forms. The prophet was a reformer, a directly inspired spiritual leader often with political powers: Jehu was proclaimed king by the prophet, Elijah. The prophets could also be social reformers and moralists: Amos (c. 750 BC) denounced racketeers who lived in luxury in the midst of poverty; Isaiah, son of Amos, preached about the obligation of the rich to care for the poor. However, this morality was presented as the will of God, not as part of a philosophical system of ethics. The prophets were messengers carrying God's word.
Later, the emotional preaching of the prophets was counterbalanced, to some extent, by the calm, detached wisdom of the sages, some of whom were influenced by Greek philosophy. For example, Ben Sirach (c. 200 BC) was sympathetic to a good deal of Greek culture but felt obliged to point out the superiority of traditional Hebrew wisdom. The sages were on the side of the oppressed and spoke of 'righteousness' as well as obedience. Another significant difference between Hebrew and Greek values was that the Jews did not disdain manual work. Yet another aspect of Jewish culture that has become part of Western civilisation is historical consciousness: God not only intervened in history but also had an historical plan for His people. Time is thus forward-looking as well as involving a record of the past - the idea of the promised land was a dominant feature of Jewish culture. It is not unconnected with the idea of progress which became so important in Western European notions of history and education.
Sadducees, Pharisees and Christian Values
From the second century BC, the Jews in Palestine were beginning to divide into two groups. First, the Sadducees who were 'fundamentalists', accepting only the Torah, the 'written law', but who occasionally flirted with some Greek ideas, including philosophy, as long as such notions were kept separate from religion. The second group, the Pharisees, accepted the Torah but believed that the laws needed to be interpreted to deal with social change; they advocated living by a combination of the Torah and the Talmud (the oral tradition of the Mishna in its written form), as well as being willing to discuss further interpretations of the Torah and the Talmud. Although the Pharisees were, in this way, more "progressive', they tended to be hostile to non-Jewish innovations, including Greek ideas. The greatest of the Pharisees was Hillel (60 BC-20 AD) who was credited with a version of the golden rule 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you'.
Beliefs shared by Jews and Christians include the following:
Education
There were elementary schools in Old Testament Palestine, but it is difficult to know how important they were. Many Jews could read but the skill was officially confined to a limited number of families since reading Hebrew was a difficult and specialised skill. For most young people, education was probably oral and took place mainly within the family. Synagogues were used for education as well as worship, but not as schools at this period; they were more like centres of education for adults, not children. Judaism was still a religion of 'The Book' but not all adults had direct access to the word: most needed to be told the stories from the Bible and have them interpreted by rabbis who were teacher-scholars rather than priests, owing their authority to their learning rather than their status.
From the second century on, the Jews in Alexandria read Greek rather than Hebrew, and had the Old Testament translated into Greek for their own educational purposes. For a time the revolt of the Maccabees separated Jewish education from Graeco-Roman ideas but it may have helped to persuade the Jews that they needed schools for their young. Simon Ben Shetah, the Pharisee leader, set up schools for boys aged about 16, mainly to encourage scriptural study. They flourished until 70 AD when the Temple was destroyed. After that they continued to exist for the Jews in their dispersal, or diaspora, as part of the means of inculcating Jewish values and beliefs. Nearly all boys attended: schooling was religious education of a nationalist kind designed to secure the survival of a religious culture. The family was probably an even more important institution for that purpose, the father being a priest for the whole family, and included an advanced ethical code. The Mishna (oral tradition) was very important as a source and was eventually written down as part of the Talmud. But the Torah was even more important, specifying details of everyday behaviour including diet. Children learned these rules from about the age of three. By the age of 13 boys were expected to understand and practise the law: texts were memorised and interpreted. There were also many feasts to be celebrated each with distinctive rituals which had to be mastered.
Jewish teachers tended to copy the schooling methods of the Greeks, but not their aims. The purpose of Jewish schools was essentially religious and nationalist: reading Hebrew was important for both purposes; however, interpretation of the texts was also stressed. At this stage writing did not feature on the curriculum: boys were simply not allowed to copy sacred scripture which was a highly specialised sacred adult role. For the young, reading the Torah was quite enough - it was extremely difficult. Arithmetic was not taught as it had no religious value; it was acquired as vocational training only by those who needed it. There was no music or physical education but health education in the form of bodily cleanliness was stressed, both at home and at school.
Schools from the third century AD
From the third century AD the elementary curriculum was broadened to include texts other than the Torah: for example, the Psalms and the Book of Proverbs. Post-elementary schools for boys 13-17 were less formally organised, in some cases resembling the Greek style of learning dating back to Socrates. Their subject matter was discussion of the Mishna. This kind of education was probably received by about 10 per cent of boys. The emphasis on memorisation and repetition continued. Teachers did not charge fees but accepted contributions from parents: they were greatly respected but were sometimes poor.
The Jewish tradition of education had a very clear purpose: it was religious-moral education, based on sacred texts and interpretations of the texts which were largely concerned with the survival of a persecuted but elite people. The curriculum was concerned with the pupil now, not as a preparation for his adult role and profession. Rich and poor children were educated together. It was a narrow curriculum but it focused on the child in a community and gave pupils exactly what parents valued.
Early Christian Education
We have already discussed the Greek influence on Jewish educational ideas from about the second century BC. The simplicity of Hebrew monotheism and the morality of the prophets were enriched by such Greek ideas as those of the Stoics which stressed willing acceptance of hardship and difficulties, submission to Nature rather than domination of it. In the first century AD, Philo, a Jewish philosopher in Alexandria, attempted a synthesis of Greek and Jewish thought which began a tradition that was also of some importance in the development of Christian ideas. Early Christian education was therefore a mixture of several different traditions: Greek, Roman, Hebrew and the teachings of Christ and his followers. This is exemplified by St Paul: originally a devout Jew (a Pharisee) living in the Roman Empire, speaking and writing in Greek, but preaching a message that was distinctively different - some would say revolutionary a set of Christian doctrines.
Schools
It is unlikely that before the capital of the Roman Empire transferred to Constantinople in the fourth century that there were many schools that could be described as Christian. The first converts to Christianity had tended to be poor, but during the second century there was a gradual change and more educated Romans began to be attracted. Generally, they would have continued to send their sons to traditional secular schools and endeavoured to have their children taught about Christianity at home and in church. This sometimes created a problem: the early Fathers disputed among themselves about the acceptability of the traditional curriculum based on Greek and Roman texts. St Justin Martyr (100-185 AD) had claimed that Christianity and Platonic philosophy shared the same God and the same process of reasoning: Socrates was a 'Christian before Christ'. Others like Tertullian (160-220 AD) regarded pagan texts as very dangerous, but better than no education.
In most cases, Christian parents used the traditional schools that were available, probably according to their social class. There were, however, a few notable exceptions where Christian school systems developed, for example in Alexandria and Syria where there were catechetical schools, interpreting the scriptures to the young (and to older converts). Such examples were rare, and even they were modelled to some extent on Greek schools. Teachers such as Origen (AD 185-254) of Alexandria expounded key texts and established a tradition of exegesis which lasted until the late Middle Ages.
The Decline of Rome
Meanwhile, the Roman Empire was facing a number of crises. First, we have already mentioned the problems of internal cohesion. The government machinery had been set up to run a republican city-state, not a vast empire. There were also social problems: in Rome and elsewhere the gap between rich and poor had grown to a dangerous extent, and there was little to bind citizens together, no religious faith, no philosophy of life, no great philosophical ideal. Moreover, corruption was the order of the day, and self-appointed moralists bemoaned the decline of traditional values and family life. Second, there were increasing external pressures on the Empire, including the city of Rome itself, from "Barbarians' of various ethnic origins coming from the north and the east. Finally, the defence of the Empire was increasingly in the hands not of Romans but of previously conquered peoples, some of whom were now supposedly subject to Roman rule.
The Move to Byzantium
The whole social and philosophical situation was so unstable that in the fourth century the Emperor Constantine decided to leave Rome and make a new capital in Greek-speaking Byzantium which he renamed Constantinople. This was the first of two momentous steps taken by Constantine; the second was to relax the prohibition of Christianity and later to become a Christian himself. From the fourth century AD the centre of Graeco-Roman civilisation, including education, shifted from Rome to Constantinople. Eventually there were two versions of Graeco-Roman civilisation and two versions of Christian teaching: Latin and Rome in the West, Greek in the east. The Roman Catholic and the Greek orthodox churches gradually grew further apart.
It is not part of our task to detail that aspect of the history of Christianity, and we shall only refer to it as it relates to the history of education. It is, however, important to emphasise that although Christ's religious message was unique, Christian education owed much to two earlier traditions - the Hebrew and the Greek. The Hebrew tradition contributed not only the literary approach of the Old Testament, but also a set of spiritual attitudes to life, death and dependence on one God. The Greek tradition contributed a powerful feeling for the wholeness of Man and the contrast between ideal and what passes for reality. Part of the story of the development of Christian education is the tension of those two traditions. We shall return to that development later.
Education: The Development of a Christian Tradition
At first there was a lack of complete unity of belief among the Christians. This problem was countered by establishing a central authority for what was later (about 115 AD) called Catholic Christianity. As the original Apostles died out, it was important to have some sources of authoritative belief, in the absence of eye-witnesses. Catholic Christianity in each community was organised under a bishop (episcopos or supervisor). The theory was that each of the original Apostles had been directly 'appointed' by Christ and the Holy Spirit; their successors were appointed by apostolic succession, that is, indirectly appointed by God himself. In 115, Bishop Ignatius of Antioch, who was shortly to be martyred by the Romans, wrote to his flock telling them to unify by supporting their bishop. He stressed the importance of obedience to priests and bishops if Christian unity was to be preserved. Thus an early traditional belief was the importance of obeying the authority of the church. One practical aspect of this belief was the Creed which converts had to memorise and repeat regularly. The Creed was a minimum statement of belief laid down by authority and about which there could be no dissent. If there was any dispute between bishops it was, somewhat later, resolved by the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, who had a direct line of succession back to St Peter. A feature of Catholic Christianity was thus established, namely, hierarchical authority: it had clear implications for Christian education.
From about 248 AD, persecution of Christians increased when there were attempts to enforce emperor-worship. Diocletian (245-313 AD) was particularly zealous: churches were demolished, scriptures burned and Christians executed or maimed. However, by the early fourth century, numbers had increased to such an extent that Constantine demanded that persecution cease completely. By 380, the Emperor Theodosius (346-95 AD) made Christianity the official state religion: paganism and heresy were forbidden by law. In this church of the late Roman Empire (fourth to sixth centuries) Christianity flourished - the age of the Western Church Fathers, Ambrose, Jerome and Gregory. Some historians have suggested that Constantine's motive in encouraging Christianity was that it would help unify the Roman Empire: he was astute enough to realise that the Empire lacked ideological consensus and that some kind of unifying force was needed. Despite its hierarchical organisation, however, Christianity was prone to differences in belief, especially doctrines about the Trinity and the Nature of Jesus Christ (was he God or man or both?). Emperors and church leaders called councils to resolve differences, but public debate sometimes had the opposite effect. Christianity began to adopt the Roman answer to heresy - persecution. The idea of tolerating dissent was rarely expressed: it was regarded as essential to know what was 'right' and to eliminate error on the basis of the authority of the Church. This was another social belief that influenced educational theory and practice.
The hierarchy necessary for enforcing orthodoxy also became more complex and more rigid. One result of such meetings as Councils was Canon Law, separate from traditional Roman law but legally enforceable. Priests and bishops needed to be educated about Canon Law as well as about Christian doctrines.
Another important development for education was the growth of monasticism. Monks living in isolation and poverty seemed to many to express Christian ideals better than bishops with their increasing wealth. The values of monasticism were, however, accommodated by the Church. (More will be said about monasticism in Chapter 5).
Schools
In most cases Christians probably took over existing Roman schools and modified their practices to some extent. This may have been a disadvantage because many of the schools were unsatisfactory in terms of organisation, curriculum and pedagogy. Nevertheless, the strength of existing arrangements and practices, such as corporal punishment, persisted and proved to be more powerful than Christ's own commandments about love and forgiveness. Moreover, in the west from the fourth century, schools and other institutions were declining or disappearing with the advance of the Barbarians and the collapse of the Roman regime.
Rome and Byzantium
In the fifth century, Rome began to withdraw armies from parts of the west, including England. The Empire effectively split in two: the Byzantine East based on Constantinople, and the West based on Rome which was gradually taken over by Germanic tribes and such kings as Odovacar and Theodoric. The Empire in Constantinople still claimed the whole of the Roman heritage and recovered some of the lost territories in Italy: for example, Justinian's famous General Belisarius won back most of Italy in the mid sixth century, but when he left, the territory slipped back to the local control of Goths or Vandals. Under these circumstances schools and education were not very high priorities. This remained the political situation of the Empire until the rise of Islam. Before embarking upon that narrative we should say more about Byzantium.
Education in Orthodox Byzantium
Although Latin remained the official language of the Byzantine Empire, by the fifth century Greek had become dominant linguistically and culturally. The majority of the population was Greek. This was important because Byzantium became a new culture, part Roman, part Greek, and from a religious point of view strongly Christian, sometimes fanatically so. Constantinople was a very large city at the centre of the Empire and needed vast numbers of literate officials and priests. Byzantine schools had two major purposes: first, to maintain Christian orthodoxy; second, to provide for the bureaucratic manpower needs of the Court and Empire.
Despite the destruction of records about secular life in Byzantium, including schools, we can be sure that schools were dominated by Christian beliefs, tempered by Greek and Roman pedagogical traditions. At first the secular and the sacred were kept separate, but later this proved impossible.2 In the fourth century, St Basil had been in favour of all children being allowed to attend those schools intended for future priests. Despite some opposition from the Church this custom became common, but those parents who were wealthy enough usually preferred to hire personal tutors (often priests or monks) for their own children. By the sixth century, schools were catering for a large proportion of children, although there was considerable regional variation. By the eleventh century, free schools were available to all children, including orphans for whom the state assumed responsibility.
Before attending school, children would have been educated at home in the Roman tradition: mothers provided elementary instruction in speaking, reading and writing. Passages from the Bible would be learned by rote. Most boys would attend school from about the age of 14 and study grammar, which included correct reading and writing and the beginnings of rhetoric. They would learn 50 lines of Homer each day and read the commentaries on the passages. In the final year at school pupils would be studying philosophy, science and the four liberal Arts - arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy (the quadrivium). Each bishop would control a religious school for future monks and priests where theology was included in the curriculum. Some would also learn to copy texts in the scriptoria.
Christianity remained a minority religion in most places in the Empire, and even within Christian areas heresies of various kinds continued to flourish. The old pagan superstitions and customs were extremely difficult to eradicate. Schools were much better at encouraging drills and rote learning than understanding the ideals of Christianity. In some places the only really effective educational institutions were the monasteries (see Chapter 5).
St Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
Augustine is better known as a theologian and philosopher, but his ideas on education are important. He was born in Tagaste, in North Africa, modern Algeria, into a reasonably prosperous family: his father wanted him to have a good education. Augustine followed a course similar to what was described in Quintilian's Instituteo. He received elementary instruction in reading, writing and ciphering at the school of a ludi magister. His memories of his schooling were not entirely favourable: he did not like study and admitted he had to be forced to work. Whether this was due to incompetent teaching or Augustine's self-confessed idleness is not clear. He passed on to a grammar school and after a while did get interested in some of his studies, but his masters were not all followers of Quintilian, and Augustine frequently suffered the rod. He was forced to study Homer in Greek, and wondered why he could not have read it in Latin, which he loved.
As he got older he read widely: he especially appreciated Virgil but arithmetic did not attract him. Augustine began to think that it was better not to be forced to learn subjects which lacked interest for the student. Finally, he was sent to a school of rhetoric at Carthage. While he was pursuing these higher studies, Augustine flirted with the Manichean heresy, the belief that God and the devil were equally powerful. He remained interested in this belief for about nine years. For a while he became a teacher of rhetoric at Tagaste until he moved to Carthage where he was worried by the unruly behaviour of the students. He left to teach in Rome where he found the students less difficult, but when he opened his own school he was troubled by the dishonesty of the students who avoided paying their fees.
By now Augustine had found and understood Aristotle's work on logic. When he moved school yet again - to Milan - he met St Ambrose (340-97), became interested in Christianity and was introduced to the Neo-Platonists. He was converted to Christianity in 386, ordained in 391 and became Bishop of Hippo in 396. He now encountered a practical educational problem involving teaching methods. It was then the policy to recruit local priests from areas targeted for conversion, but the native Numidian trainee priests knew no Latin and found difficulty in mastering liturgical music. Augustine reflected on the problem and came up with solutions based partly on his experience and partly from 'the pagan world'. In Augustine's time some Christians were opposed to making use of any pagan ideas and literature, and disapproved of sending Christian children to pagan schools. However, the Fathers had learned to make good use of pagan culture, some even pointing out similarities between Plato and St Paul. Augustine was attracted by that kind of solution and concentrated on bringing classical learning into the service of Christianity. Part of pagan culture treated in this way was the curriculum based on the seven liberal Arts: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music (the quadrivium); and grammar, rhetoric and logic (the trivium). Augustine worked hard to harmonise the two traditions and largely succeeded. Uneducated trainee priests had to learn Latin by traditional methods as part of their Christian education.
Apart from one book, De Magistro (On the Teacher), which is devoted to an exposition of some basic educational problems in the form of an imaginary dialogue with his son, Augustine's educational ideas are scattered throughout his other writings. De Magistro is partly an enquiry into the origin of our ideas: are these ideas in the mind itself or as a result of an external agency such as sense experiences? Popular thinking in Augustine's day favoured the idea of the child with an empty mind that needed filling by means of verbal communication from teacher to pupil. Augustine saw the question in a more complex way: he did not accept the straightforward correspondence between language and thought, and recognised the need for the pupil to be actively involved in the learning process. The true function of language in learning was not to bring ideas into our minds but to stimulate and awaken those that were already there. Teaching had to start with the familiar and proceed to the unfamiliar. Augustine saw teaching as the activity of causing pupils to learn, but the learning process was in itself necessarily an active process. He thought that when learning did take place it was the result of 'divine illumination'.
A second problem that Augustine attempted to solve was the nature of universality in our thinking: for example, the shift from saying that three sticks added to five sticks make eight sticks to the more abstract 3 + 5 = 8. Augustine brought Platonic thinking to bear on this: namely the relation between ideal and reality, adding that God was the source of all our knowledge. He also had much to offer on the question of curriculum: the seven liberal arts of the trivium and quadrivium, which he used in a much more flexible way than his teaching contemporaries. He apparently wrote extensively on six of the liberal arts, but the only one to survive is De Musica.
One aspect of Augustine's theology which had unfortunate implications for education was his view of predestination and original sin. He thought that Adam, before the Fall, had free will and the capacity for good but that once he and Eve had sinned, the human race lost this capacity and deserved eternal damnation. All who died unbaptised would go to hell because they were essentially wicked as a result of Adam's sin. By God's grace, according to Augustine, some people were chosen to go to heaven. There was no hope for the others. This pessimistic view of humanity, which was eventually rejected by the Catholic Church but adopted by the seventeenth-century theologian, John Calvin, might also suggest that some could learn but others were destined to eternal ignorance. This did not fit in well with Augustine's more enlightened views of education, and in particular how children learn.
Conclusion
Whereas in Greece and Rome moral education was a powerful element in the curriculum, in Judaism, education was religious education: history, literature, indeed the whole of knowledge was filtered through a religious ideology. Rabbis were essentially scholar-teachers operating within a strict religious context centred on the synagogue. This tradition, which identified education almost totally with religious education was, eventually, taken over by the Roman Catholic Church in the West and by the Byzantine (Orthodox) Church in the East, which passed on the same tradition to Russia by way of the Orthodox Church. This total identification of religious belief and education encouraged a static view of knowledge and proved to be an impediment to necessary changes on several occasions, as we shall see in later chapters. If we define education as being essentially open-ended, then systems of schooling which emphasise conformity and obedience run the risk of becoming anti-educational, even anti-humanistic. The memorisation and exegesis of sacred texts is not, in the long run, a satisfactory alternative to the development of powers of thinking and critical understanding.
References
1. E.B. Castle, Ancient Education and Today (Penguin, 1961) p. 155.
2. T.T. Rice, Everyday Life in Byzantium (Barnes and Noble Books, New York, 1967), p. 192.
Further Reading
Foss, C. and Magdaiino, P., Rome and Byzantium (Elsevier-Phaidon, Oxford, 1977).
Norwich, J.J.. Byzantium: The Apogee (Penguin,1991).