História da Educação na Antiguidade

by Henri-Irénée Marrou, Mário Leônidas Casanova (Translator)

"Não se deve dizer, como o fazem frequentemente seu detratores, que a cultura clássica 'nasceu com a cabeça virada para trás', olhando para o passado: ela não é como um outono, toturado com a lembrança nostálgica da primavera desaparecida. Ela se imagina antes de tudo como firmemente estabelecida num imóvel presente, em plena lz de um quente sol de verão. Ela sabe, ela reusa; os mestres estão ali. Pouco importa que eles hajam aparecido em tal ou qual momento do passado, sob o efeito de tal ou qual força histórica: o importante é que existam, que novamente os descubra, da mesma maneira, cada uma das gerações sucessivas, que sejam reconhecidos, admirados, imitados".

Genres: Education, History, Nonfiction, Classics, Philosophy, Teaching, Roman

680 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1948

About the author

Nacido en 1904 en una familia católica de clase media, del sur de Francia, Marrou realizó sus estudios en la Escuela Normal Superior de París sobre la calle Ulm, y obtuvo la agregación de historia en 1929, en segunda posición, detrás de Alphonse Dupront. Entró, acto seguido, en la Escuela francesa de Roma, donde trabajó hondamente sobre Agustín de Hipona.
Admirador de Pierre Teilhard de Chardin y de Charles Péguy, conoció a Emmanuel Mounier, con quien colaboraría en la revista Esprit a partir de 1935. Fue asimismo el fundador de los Estudios agustinianos.
Viajó entonces a Nápoles y El Cairo, antes de ser docente en Nancy y luego Montepllier. Se doctoró en 1937, con la presentación de su tesis sobre San Agustín y el fin de la cultura antigua. Músico aficionado, se convertiría además en miembro de la Academia Charles-Cros y redactaría bajo el seudónimo de «Henri Davenson», artículos y libros de musicología. Publicaría también en dicha revista artículos que serían ensamblados en 1978 con el título Crisis de nuestro tiempo y reflexión cristiana (de 1930 a 1975).
Durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, se unió a la Resistencia. De 1945 a 1975, ocupó la cátedra de historia del cristianismo en la Sorbona y escribió sus obras más importantes. Fue uno de los primeros colaboradores de la colección Fuentes cristianas; publicó a su vez la Patristica Sorbonensia, editados por Le Seuil, una colección de trabajos académicos sobre temas relacionadas con los Padres de la Iglesia Católica, a los que había asimismo editado.
Por otro lado, con otros estudiosos denunció el uso de la tortura durante la Guerra de Argelia, actitud que le valdría persecución en ese momento. Aprobó vivamente el Concilio Vaticano II, combatiendo a su vez a los integristas y los progresistas influenciados por el marxismo; pero no le atrajo del Mayo francés.
Sus libros ricos y ponderados sobre la cultura intelectual y religiosa de la Antigüedad Tardía, sus trabajos sobres los Padres de la Iglesia Católica (particularmente Agustín de Hipona), sus reflexiones sobre el «conocimiento histórico» y la teología de la historia, le valdrían una reputación internacional, y atrajeron a muchos discípulos.
Fue amigo del historiador Marcel Simon y miembro de la escuela francesa de los Annales, junto a otros historiadores como Fernand Braudel, Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Philippe Ariès y Georges Duby entre otros.

Reviews

[Davis Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really excellent, and basically one of a kind in terms of its particular subject matter. I'm sure there are areas where Marrou oversimplifies things and makes some rash judgments, but I'm not yet acquainted enough with the other scholarship to make definitive pronunciations on whether or not that is the case (most of the time, at least—for a Roman Catholic scholar, he seems surprisingly acerbic toward early Christianity in the final chapters). Either way, it remains a standard volume for the study of educational history, and even though it is quite dense, everyone who wants to take the next step in understanding classical education should read at least parts of it.

[Felipe Oquendo · Rating 5 out of 5]

O tempo que eu levei para ler o livro não faz justiça ao seu conteúdo e ao seu autor: o conteúdo é interessantíssimo, per se e pela forma como é passado. O autor não poderia ser mais erudito.

Sua busca pela "Forma", hegeliana, da Escola Clássica, é extremamente empolgante e interessante. Essa forma - spoilers! - é a tríplice partição entre Mestre Escola (magister ludi), correspondente ao primário, Gramático, correspondente ao secundário e Retórico, correspondente ao nível superior (onde, contudo, desde o período helenista, divida as atenções com a Medicina, a Filosofia e, após Roma, o Direito) todas essas palavras significando algo muito diferente do que aponta o dicionário de hoje.

O livro passa pela Grécia Antiga, Roma e termina apontando para o final da Alta Idade Média, com a Renascença Carolíngia. É a história de como a cultura dos guerreiros vai sendo substituída pela dos escribas e, finalmente, pela dos religiosos.

Enfim, um grande livro, que recomendo a todos os estudantes de História e de Educação.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Arsnoctis]

Lettura parziale in preparazione della tesi, per quel che ho potuto leggere si tratta di un volume particolarmente esaustivo sui temi dell'educazione in Grecia e a Roma. Seppure non si tratti di un testo recente, ne consiglio la lettura a chi fosse interessato ad approfondire il tema.

[Michael Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome book. Lays out the development of education in the Greek Polis and its influence on all education since.

[Robert Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

For such an academic and dry subject as the history of education, Marrou makes it as entertaining and relevant as possible. His numerous examples and the analogies helps the reader to understand the material while keeping it interesting. He also provides many parallels of the problems of the ancient's with their education and the problems in our own day, which have only been exaggerated since Marrou's time. I am highly impressed with his erudition and the amount of detail he goes into all the way from archaic Greece to the early medieval period.

The only complaint I have about the work is the difficulty of keeping up with the chronology of the developments. Often he gives a general statement that seems to encapsulate all of the period you are studying, but then later in the chapter or the next, he will say some development occurred. So he has a problem of trying to beIt would help if he included some sort of timeline at the beginning of each chapter or even at the end of the book.

[Jagordo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of repetition at points. Marrou focuses on the wrong people at times — for instance, the most edifying pieces of the book are when he recounts the notes of a Roman child going to primary school in 125BC; it would be excellent to have more of these pieces quoted in the book, but he instead focuses on short three-to-four sentence retellings on how some noble sent their child to some school because they thought it the best around. Both should be included in the book, but the latter is less useful when repeated two dozen times over and with the same overdetailed approach

[Michał Hołda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the most particularly the first part of the book, because it is packed with information about figures of ancient past, and with help of good old internet and Wikipedia I could easily study them.

Second part is about education, how youth learns alphabet and all the details that bring past to life.

And in the last part we have as how it was later in Rome, indeed.

[Guilherme Falk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mostra como a educação da retórica/oratória foi desde, os sofistas, perpetuada até a antiguidade cristã. Demonstra também o embate entre filósofos e retores pelos domínios educacionais na antiguidade.

[Ted Newell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommended to me by Michael Warren OSB long time teacher of R E at St Johns University Long Island and crusader for a gospel currently covered with irrelevance. Marrou's book is full of insights; detailed but never pedantic scholarship.