Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/279

[priests] of Japan are to be credited with being mainly instrumental in spreading a knowledge of the rudiments of education throughout the length and breadth of the Empire." In his Embassy to Ava Syme writes:—

"All kioums or monasteries are seminaries, in which boys are taught their letters and instructed in moral and religious duties."

To like effect, from a work entitled The Burman, by Shway Yeo, we learn that—

"When a boy has reached the age of eight or nine years he goes as a matter of course to the Pohngyee Kyoung [Monastic School]. It is open to all alike—to the poor fisherman's son as well as to the scion of princely blood."

And the Catholic missionary Sangermano testifies similarly: implying, also, that this education given by the priests is nominally in preparation for the priesthood, since the students all put on "the habit of a Talapoin" during the period of their education. The Mahometans, too, yield evidence. At the present time in Cairo the university is in a mosque.

 

Illustrative facts taken from the accounts of extinct and decayed civilizations in the Old World, may be next grouped together—some of them mere hints and others sufficiently full.

Concerning ancient India, Dutt states that education consisted of learning the Vedas, and that in the later as in the earlier periods it was under the priests. He also says:—

"There were Parishads or Brâhmanic settlements for the cultivation of learning. . . and young men went to these Parishads to acquire learning."

To this there must be added the significant fact that in the Epic Period (ca. b. c. 1400 to 1000)—

"Besides these Parishads, individual teachers established what would be called private schools in Europe, and often collected round themselves students from various parts of the country. . . . Learned Brâhmans who had retired to forests in their old age often collected such students round them, and much of the boldest speculations in the Epic Period has proceeded from these sylvan and retired seats of sanctity and learning."

Taken in conjunction with the preceding statements this last statement shows us how teaching was in the beginning exclusively concerned with religious doctrines and rites, and how there eventually began to arise a teaching which, in some measure detached from the religious institutions, at the same time entered upon other subjects than the religious.

A kindred, if less elaborated, system existed in ancient Persia.

"It is pretty clear that the special training of boys for future callings went hand in hand with their religious education, and that it was chiefly regulated according to the profession of the father. . . . It was evidently also no uncommon practice to commit children to the care of a priest for training and instruction in the same manner as the Indian Brahmins were wont to do."