1. _Primary education_, covering the years from seven or eight to thirteen, and embracing reading, writing, arithmetic, and chanting. The teacher of this school came to be known as a _grammatist_.
2. _Secondary education_, covering the years from thirteen to sixteen, and embracing geometry, drawing, and a special music course. Later on some grammar and rhetoric were introduced into this school. The teacher of this school came to be known as a _grammaticus_.
3. _Higher or university education_, covering the years after sixteen.
THE FLOOD OF INDIVIDUALISM. This period of artistic and intellectual brilliancy of Greece following the Peloponnesian War marked the beginning of the end of Greece politically. The war was a blow to the strength of Greece from which the different States never recovered. Greece was bled white by this needless civil strife. The tendencies toward individualism in education were symptomatic of tendencies in all forms of social and political life. The philosophers--Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle--proposed ideal remedies for the evils of the State, [6] but in vain. The old ideal of citizenship died out. Service to the State became purely subordinate to personal pleasure and advancement. Irreverence and a scoffing attitude became ruling tendencies. Family morality decayed. The State in time became corrupt and nerveless. Finally, in 338 B.C., Philip of Macedon became master of Greece, and annexed it to the world empire which he and his son Alexander created. Still later, in 146 B.C., the new world power to the west, Rome, conquered Greece and made of it a Roman province.
Though dead politically, there now occurred the unusual spectacle of "captive Greece taking captive her rude conqueror," and spreading Greek art, literature, philosophy, science, and Greek ideas throughout the Mediterranean world. It was the Greek higher learning that now became predominant and exerted such great influence on the future of our world civilization. It remains now to trace briefly the development and spread of this higher learning, and to point out how thoroughly it modified the thinking of the future.
NEW SCHOOLS; SOCRATES. In the beginning each Sophist teacher was a free lance, and taught what he would and in the manner he thought best. Many of them made extraordinary efforts to attract students and win popular approval and fees. Plato represents the Sophist Protagoras as saying, with reference to a youth ambitious for success in political life, "If he comes to me he will learn that which he comes to learn." At first the instruction was largely individual, but later classes were organized. Isocrates, who lived from 436 to 338 B.C., organized the instruction for the first time into a well-graded sequence of studies, with definite aims and work (R. 8). He shifted the emphasis in instruction from training for success in argumentation, to training to think clearly and to express ideas properly. His pupils were unusually successful, and his school did much to add to the fame of Athens as an intellectual center. From his work sprang a large number of so called Rhetorical Schools, much like our better private schools and academies, offering to those Ephebes who could afford to attend a very good preparation for participation in the public life of the period.