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§ 13. The taking of the classical scholar as the only ideal of the educated man has been a fruitful source of evil in the history of education.

I. This ideal exalted the learner above the doer. As far back as Xenophon, we find a contest between the passive ideal and the active, between the excellence which depends on a knowledge of what others have thought and done and the excellence which comes of thinking and doing. But the excellence derived from learning had never been highly esteemed. To be able to repeat Homer’s poetry was regarded in Greece as we now regard a pleasing accomplishment; but the dignity of the learned man as such was not within the range of Greek ideas. Many of the Romans after they began to study Greek literature certainly piqued themselves on being good Greek scholars, and Cicero occasionally quotes with all the airs of a pedant; but so thoroughly was the contrary ideal, the ideal of the doer, established at Rome, that nobody ever dreamt of placing its rival above it. In the decline of the Empire, especially at Alexandria, we find for the first time honours paid to the learned man; but he was soon lost sight of again. At the Renascence he burst into sudden blaze, and it was then discovered that he was what every man would wish to be. Thus the Renascence scholars, notwithstanding their admiration of the great nations of antiquity, set up an ideal which those nations would heartily have despised. The schoolmaster very readily adopted this ideal; and schools have been places of learning, not training, ever since.