ABSTRACT
In truth, the history of pedagogy dates but from the period relatively recent, when human thought, in the matter of education, substituted reflection for instinct, art for blind nature. To know what education has actually done people need to know the condition of societies unaffected by systematic education. So the authors hasten to begin the study of pedagogy among the classical peoples, the Greeks and the Romans, after having thrown a rapid glance over some Eastern nations considered either in their birthplace and remote origin, or in their more recent development. The chief characteristic of the education of the Hebrews in the earliest period of their history is that it was essentially domestic. Mutual instruction has been practised in India from the remotest antiquity; it is from here, in fact, that Andrew Bell, at the close of the eighteenth century, borrowed the idea of this mode of instruction.
