‘To the Glory that was Greece’

It was John Stuart Mill who once remarked that the Greeks were the initiators of nearly everything, Christianity excepted, of importance in the western world, and no study of nineteenth-century English education can ignore them. Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras the two classical languages, Latin and Greek, dominated the curriculum of the public schools — generally taking more than half of the available classroom time. Most schoolmasters had read classics at the ancient universities, and as late as 1914, 92 of the 114 public school headmasters were classicists.1 Much earlier, Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby from 1828 to 1842, had brought in two important innovations to the teaching of classics, which had increased their popularity: first, he shifted the balance away from Latin and towards Greek; and secondly, he used a mix of classics and history and applied it to explain contemporary social and political problems.2 Arnold's reforms were soon to extend to most public schools, and after 1840 the classical pendulum stayed firmly in the Greek sector. Thus the ideas of the ancient Greeks, suitably filtered at school for adolescent consumption, gradually came to provide the philosophical grounding and the mystical support for all shades of Victorian opinion; and though only a tiny minority of the nation might learn Greek — and only a small minority of them took their studies seriously — the influence of the reading men was soon to be most persuasive.KeywordsPublic SchoolSchool LifeTeam GameMoral TrainingRugby FootballThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Art · Christianity · Glory · Greeks · Literature · Political science · Politics · Popularity · Reading (process) · Classical Studies and Philology · Classics · Historical and Literary Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Sports, Gender, and Society

• Education in manliness

  Malcolm Tozer•Religion•1987

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