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SCHÖNINGEN—SCHOOLS
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possesses eleven panels by him, and a small panel of “David with Goliath’s Head” in the Munich Gallery is attributed to him. The miniature painting of the “Death of the Virgin” in the English National Gallery is probably the work of some pupil.[1] In 1488 Schongauer died at Colmar, according to the register of St Martin’s church. Other authorities state that his death, occurred in 1491.

The main work of Schongauer’s life was the production of a large number of beautiful engravings, which were largely sold, not only in Germany, but also in Italy and even in England. Vasari says that Michelangelo copied one of his engravings the “Trial of St Anthony.”[2] Schongauer was known in Italy by the names “Bel Martino” and “Martino d’Anversa.” His subjects are always religious; more than 130 prints from copper by his hand are known, and about 100 more are the production of his bottega.[3] Most of his pupils’ plates as well as his own are signed M+S. Among the most beautiful of Schongauer’s engravings are the series of the “Passion” and the “Death and Coronation of the Virgin,” and the series of the “Wise and Foolish Virgins.” All are remarkable for their miniature-like treatment, their brilliant touch, and their chromatic force. Some, such as the “Death of the Virgin” and the “Adoration of the Magi” are richly-filled compositions of many figures, treated with much largeness of style in spite of their minute scale.

The British Museum possesses a fine collection of Schongauer’s prints. Fine facsimiles of his engravings have been produced by Armand-Durand with text by Duplessis (Paris, 1881).

SCHÖNINGEN, a town of Germany, in the duchy of Brunswick, 29 m. by rail W. of Magdeburg. Pop. (1905) 9298. It has three churches, and manufactures of chemicals, machinery and sausages. The place is mentioned as early as 747 and received municipal rights in 1370. It has the remains of a ducal residence and some interesting wooden houses.

SCHOOLCRAFT, HENRY ROWE (1793–1864), American traveller, ethnologist and author, was born on the 28th of March 1793 at what is now Guilderland, New York, and died at Washington on the 10th of December 1864. After studying chemistry and mineralogy in Union College he had several years’ experience of their application, especially at a glass-factory of which his father was manager, and in 1817 published his Vitreology. In the following year he collected geological and mineralogical specimens in Missouri and Arkansas, and in 1819 he published his View of the Lead Mines of Missouri. In 1820 he accompanied General Lewis Cass as geologist in his expedition to the Upper Mississippi and the Lake Superior copper region, and in 1823 he was appointed Indian agent for the Lake Superior country. More than sixteen millions of acres were ceded by the Indians to the United States in treaties which he negotiated. He married the granddaughter of an Indian chief; and during several years’ official work near Lake Superior, and later under authorisation of an Act of Congress of 1847, he acquired much information as to institutions, &c., of the American natives. From 1828 to 1831 Schoolcraft was an active member of the Michigan legislature. In 1832, when on an embassy to some Indians, he ascertained the real source of the Mississippi to be Lake Itasca.

In 1825 he published Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley, and in 1839 appeared his Algic Researches, containing Indian legends, notably, “The Myth of Hiawatha and other Oral Legends.” He composed a considerable quantity of poetry and several minor prose works, especially Notes on the Iroquois (1846); Scenes and Adventures in the Ozark Mountains (1853). His principal book, Historical and Statistical Information respecting the Indian Tribes of the United States, illustrated with 336 plates from original drawings, in part a compilation, was issued under the patronage of Congress in six quarto volumes, from 1851 to 1857.

SCHOOLS. As is the case with so many of the institutions of modern civilization, so with schools; the name, the thing, the matter, the method have been derived from Greece through Rome. A strange fortune has converted the Greek word σχολή, which originally meant leisure, particularly the “retired leisure that in trim gardens takes his pleasure” of men, into the proper term for the modern school.

Greek Schools.—The term and the institution date, not from the great or what may be called the Hellenic age of Greece, but from the later Macedonian or Hellenistic period. The account given by K. I. Freeman in his Schools of Hellas (1907) may be summed up in the statement, “There were no schools in Hellas.” That is, there were no schools in our sense, where, during boyhood and youth, boys spent their whole time in a continuous course of instruction. There were professional teachers of three kinds: (1) the grammatistes, who taught reading, with writing and perhaps arithmetic, in the grammateion; (2) the citharistes, who taught music, i.e. playing and singing to the cithara—it is significant that there was no Word for the music school; (3) the paedotribes, who taught gymnastic, wrestling, boxing, running, jumping, throwing the javelin, &c., in the palaistra. To these teachers the boys were taken by slaves, called boy-leaders (παιδαγωγοί, whence our pedagogues), as single pupils, and they were taught not in classes but singly.

That all boys did not go through all three schools is clear. For we hear of Socrates, when he was grown up, repairing to a lyre-school to learn music, because he thought his education was not complete without it. Roughly, the age for the grammar-school and song-school was 7 to 14, for the gymnastic school 12 to 18. A certain amount of literature was imparted, as, especially in the song-school, Homer and other early poets, the very Bibles of Hellas, were learnt by heart. In later days, under the Sophists, and Socrates, “the greatest of the Sophists,” 450–400 B.C., something approaching to secondary education was developed. But it was wholly unorganized, though a similar division of labour between separate private tutors took place as in primary education. The orators or rhetoricians taught oratory, and the learning that was considered necessary to the political orator, a smattering of Greek history, constitutional law and elementary logic. The philosophers, such as Protagoras, discoursed vaguely on natural science, “things in the heavens above and the earth beneath,” and divinity, “whether there are gods or not,” mathematics and ethics, or any subject which attracted them, while the lawyers, in the same unsystematic way, taught what law was necessary in a state where the constitution was at the mercy of chance majorities in a sovereign assembly of 30,000 people, and trials at law were settled by 600 jurymen-judges. The orators and sophists were popular lecturers, here to-day and gone to-morrow. There was no coördination between them, no regular curriculum, and the youths wandered from one to another as their own or their parents' prejudices and purses dictated.

In the next generation, the orators and the philosophers, by settling down in fixed places, began to establish something more like schools. Plato, though like his master Socrates he taught without asking fees, was the first to give a regular educational course extending over three or four years, and in a fixed place, the Academy. The gymnasium was originally a parade or practice ground for the militia or conscript army of the state, which derived its name from the exercises being in that climate performed naked (γυμνός). At the age of 15 or 16 the boys left the palaestra, or private gymnasium, for this public training school, maintained at the public expense, preparatory to their admission as youths (ἔφηβοι), to take the oath of citizenship and undergo two years’ compulsory training in regiments on the frontier. After those two years were over, they still required continuous exercise to keep themselves in training; consequently men of all ages, from 16 to 60, were to be found in the gymnasium. Though the gymnasium was free, the teachers and trainers in gymnastics were paid, and as the poorer citizens had to earn their own living, the Athenian gymnasium, like the modern university, was for educational purposes chiefly frequented

  1. Another painting of the same subject in the Doria Palace in Rome (usually attributed to Dürer) is given to Schongauer by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Flemish Painters (London, 1872), p. 359; but the execution is not equal to Schongauer’s wonderful touch.
  2. An interesting example of Schongauer’s popularity in Italy is given by the lovely Faenza plate in the British Museum, on which is painted a copy of Martin’s beautiful engraving of the “Death of the Virgin.”
  3. See Bartsch, Peintre Graveur, and Willshire, Ancient Prints, best edition of 1877. According to a German tradition Schongauer was the inventor of printing from metal plates; he certainly was one of the first who brought the art to perfection. See an interesting article by Sidney Colvin in the Jahrbuch der k. preussischen Kunstsammlung, vi. p. 69 (Berlin, 1885).