BY DR. JOSE MA. EDUARDO P. DACUDAO
IF YOU are a parent concerned with your children’s education, this article is for you.
Our modern society’s current idea of higher education began in Greece. The two most notable schools were the Academy founded in 387 BC by Plato and the Lyceum founded in 335 BC by Aristotle. They offered advanced studies in Philosophy, which at that time encompassed a very broad field which also delved into Mathematics, the Physical Sciences, and the Biological Sciences. The language that was used in such Greek schools was Greek.
The budding Roman Republic had always admired Greek culture, and may have patterned the Roman Senate from the democratic rule of the free classes in Greek city states. From 146 BC, when the Romans defeated Corinth, until 31 BC, when the Romans defeated Cleopatra’s Hellenistic Egypt, Rome took over what remained of the Greek territories. Instead of destroying Greek culture, the Romans enthusiastically adopted it.
It became common practice for the Roman aristocrats to acquire highly favored Greek slaves in order to personally tutor their children in the Greek language, classics, and philosophy. These Greek-loving aristocratic Roman children would normally grow up to be the new leaders of Rome, and would naturally continue patronizing Greek culture. Greek-type learning institutions flourished in the ensuing Roman Empire, the most famous of which is the Library of Alexandria in the 4th century. Instruction naturally was in Greek or in Latin that borrowed many of its technical terms from Greek.
From the remains of Greco-Roman civilization, modern Colleges and Universities arose in the 12th century. Universities were founded in Italy, France , England , Germany , Poland , and Bohemia . They started as groups of students, usually of the same ethnicity, that would band together in the towns and cities were prominent learned men taught. The resulting community would become known as a collegium (Latin ‘society’).
By the latter half of the 12th century, the University of Paris in France had become the leading institution of learning in Europe. Other Universities at that time became famous for specializing in Law (University of Bologna in Italy ), and Medicine (the University of Salerno in Italy ).
Liberal arts was the common curriculum in most of these Universities, and consisted of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (music, astronomy, geometry, and mathematics). After completing these, some students proceeded to study such specialties as theology, law, or medicine.
Why are we reviewing this history?
Because the medium of instruction of these Universities was Latin (that borrowed heavily from Greek), the universal language of science, learning, and commerce in Europe.
It took the Greeks and the Romans hundreds of years to develop a technical vocabulary for Philosophy, the stem subject of all our modern subjects. Just as the Romans adopted the Greek vocabulary into their medium of instruction, so did the ensuing civilizations that inherited the Greco-Roman culture adopt the Greco-Latin terms in their own institutions of learning.
Note that the French, Italians, Spanish, Germans, English, and Poles did not dare to change the Greco-Latin terms of Natural Philosophy. They merely borrowed and added on to this vocabulary, the additions also being in Latin as a matter of standard.
The idea of inventing a non-existent German word for an idea that was already known by its Latin name, in order to prove that one was a patriotic German for instance, was totally ridiculous in the minds of these educators and the institutions that they represented.
The purpose of these institutions was not to transform a student into a fanatical nationalistic German but into a learned person. The Germanic languages at that time (including English) simply did not have the terms for the intricate subjects that had directly arisen from the older Greco-Roman learning institutions. (To be continued)/PN
