On education in ancient Rome, today, and... Teachers, leave them kids alone!

Scene from the animated version of the video for Pink Floyd's "Another brick in the wall".

“Seneca disapproved of teaching methods which do not prepare men for life, but only pupils for school: “non vitae sed scholae discimus.” On the first page of his romance Petronius pokes fun at the sonority of pompous phrases which filled the classrooms of his day. Tacitus sadly remarks that “the tyrannicides, the plague cures, the incests of mothers which are so grandiloquently discussed in the schools bear no relation to the ‘forum’ and that all this bombast hurls defiance at the truth.” Juvenal scoffs at these would-be orators, these unmitigated asses, this Arcadian youth “who feels no flutter in his left breast when he dins his ‘dire Hannibal’ into my unfortunate head on every sixth day of the week,” and these unhappy teachers of rhetoric who perish of “the same cabbage served up again and again.” We have no need to be more Roman than the Romans and to try to whitewash a system whose frenzied pedantry the best of them have reviled.

… The decay of a civilization is heralded by these laborious eccentricities, by the mental malnutrition to which the pick of Rome’s youth was doomed, having no other intellectual sustenance than this thin soup. For fear of being accused of ignorance, the ambitious youth who wished to dazzle and astonish his audience substituted memory for thought, affectation for sincerity, grimaces and contortions for natural expression, and for a natural voice forced outbursts and calculated roars practiced in advance.

A morbid passion for the unusual and the extraordinary made common sense seem a defect experience of real life seem weakness, and the sight of real life seem ugly. But Life herself inevitably took revenge, and the Romans themselves began to weary of the fatuities of their schools. The more impetuous among them failed to distinguish real learning from the parody of it which disgusted them, and like Lucian resolved to doubt and make a mock of everything, or like the common people turned their backs on every form of culture and limited their thoughts to the satisfaction of their needs and their desires. The more inquiring and the nobler spirits, deceived but not discouraged, turned aside to foreign religions to seek an answer to the questions with which the mysteries of life confronted them, to find a satisfaction for the aspirations of their souls which neither bogus science nor the threadbare literature of grammarians and rhetoricians had sufficed to fill.”

The simple, natural life.

From “Daily life in ancient Rome”, by Jérôme Carcopino.

Jérôme Carcopino