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JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
Saxons might have kept wandering in the woods forever. For the Greeks
began everything of which the modern world can boast.
Above all the Greeks began education, and, from my point of view,
the greatest pedagogical treatise written in the twentieth century is a
history, the massive, profound and probably idealized version of Greek
pedagogy given by Werner Jaeger in
Paidea.
The cornerstones of this
pedagogical scheme, as set forth by Jaeger, were language or literature,
mathematics and music: words, theory and rhythm and harmony. In
Jaeger's words:
They considered that the only genuine forces which could form the
soul were words and sounds, and-so far as they work through
words or sounds or both-rhythm and harmony.
Thus it was that the Greek created, self-created, the first full human
beings in history; in Jaeger's words: "Other nations made gods, kings,
spirits; the Greeks alone made men."
If
these assertions are merely
expressions of the old Germanic obsession with the perfections of Greece
and if in truth such a harmony never existed (Socrates and the hem–
lock, and so on), then one can still say that it constitutes the greatest
educational ideal ever propounded and that it is the destiny of educa–
tion in the future to approximate its realization. Greek and Latin unlock
language, literature and history; mathematics unlocks the sciences; music
unlocks the world of the arts. Each component is a beautiful thing in
itself (even Latin declensions and semideponent verbs ) and, taken
together, they are at the origin of almost everything worthwhile that
the human reason and imagination have discovered or created. Upon
such a foundation a genuine higher educational system could properly
be built.
John Henry Raleigh
