Keeping the Struggle Alive: Studying Desegregation in Our Town, A Guide to Doing Oral History Book

In this history, Marrou traces the trajectory of classical education. He begins in Homeric Greece, positioning this culture as a forerunner of medieval feudalism. The "knights" at the apex of this culture were sporting ones, and the ideal knight was "both orator and warrior" (8). Education thus wove together military and rhetorical preparation. Marrou argues that Sparta, originally a bastion of culture, lost its way because it attempted to petrify itself in this early stage. Athens moved forward, however, beacuse "somewhere in the middle of the sixth century..., [Athenian] education lost its essentially military character" (36). Given its knightly and Homeric origins, however, that education remained aristocratic and artistic even as it was slowly extended to more and more young citizens. This extension was interconnected with the rise of the school and a shift away from a model of education based on an individual relationship between aristocratic youth and private tutors. The Sophists played a key role here. Though the economic aspect (i.e. that they charged students tuition) of the Sophists' schools earned them mockery from the conservative aristocracy, Marrou positions them as taking a key step in the development of classical education. He sets up Isocrates and Plato as exemplars of this stage of development, with Isocrates representing rhetoric, "the Word," and the Sophists' attempts to educate the ideal orator-statesman, and Plato representing philosophy, "Truth," and the aristocratic attempt to keep governance in the hands of a few trained philosopher-politicians. The binary is not pure, however, and Marrou notes the ways in which rhetoric borrowed from philosophy and vice versa. He admires both Isocrates and Plato, positioning the latter as the founder of a sort of non-banking model of education that attempted to develop students' critical faculties rather than impart fixed knowledge. Even as Hellenistic education spread, became less about sports and the body, and shifted from aristocratic to democratic ends, however, Marrou positions it as inseparable from origins in a knightly Homeric tradition, with the ephebic schools of Greece maintaining an education that was aristocratic, artistic, and non-technical.

Roman education, on the other hand, had its origins in "peasant education" (231). As Rome developed into an empire, however, its aristocracy began to realize the political benefits of oratorical/rhetorical education in the Greek tradition and began what Marrou argues is an almost wholesale adoption of the preexistent model of Hellenistic education: grammarians, rhetors, the progymnasmata, contrived declamations. At first, the teachers of this education were the Greek slaves of well-to-do families--somewhat like the enslaved pedagogues who took young Greek boys to and from school and were de facto responsible for those boys' practical moral education. As Greek education grew more popular, however, Greek educators began to move to Rome and set up schools. Again, this seems reminiscent of the fact that most of the early public schools in Athens were started by foreigners. It wasn't long before young Romans like Cicero were travelling to Greece itself to study abroad. Roman education thus slowly lost its peasant origins and became, like that of the Greeks, an artistic education for aristocratic youth. Given what Marrou positions as the formalistic, State-centered nature of Roman governance, however, schools were increasingly public institutions. The "scribe education" Marrou references at the beginning of his book is realized as these publicly funded schools slowly became training grounds for civil servants--the future bureaucrats of the Roman Empire.

With the disintegration of the empire, however, Marrou sees Christian education--a decisively non-classical education--taking over. In this education, the focus was Biblical literacy rather than abstract analytical skills, the teacher was revered rather than scorned, and the focus was on training future clergy rather than politicians and/or political technicians.