Recommendation
of the Committee on the Goodwin Award of Merit
Raffaella
Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind (2001)
All
students of the ancient world have reason to be
interested in what liberal education was like. The
everyday reality of how children were taught to read and
write and to solve arithmetic problems, what was read in
schools, and how schools functioned within ancient
societies, has significant implications for literary
scholars and historians alike. The evidence, however, is
difficult. Raffaella Cribiore's Gymnastics of the
Mind makes it look
easy. Having collected and examined the relevant papyri
in her earlier monograph, Writing, teachers,
and students in Graeco-Roman Egypt,
Cribiore offers a rich synthesis of archaeological,
epigraphical, and literary evidence with the information
about educational practices to be won from papyri, both
those directly pertaining to schools and those that refer
to educational practice. She demonstrates in exemplary
fashion how much can be won by bringing together
comparative evidence, school exercises, letters and other
documents, and literary sources, and especially how much
apparently undistinguished papyri can tell us.
The
book offers wonderfully sharp, varied, and unexpected
glimpses of education in Greco-Roman Egypt: the possible
school in a pharonaic tomb; the math problem whose answer
is that the theater at Oxyrhynchus had eight thousand,
four hundred seats; the little girl Heraidous whose
mother is told in a letter that she is working hard at
her studies. Though nobody is surprised at the importance
of Homer, the difference between the Iliad
and the Odyssey is fascinating: both papyri and quotations
suggest that students read the Iliad
through continuously, and learned the early books most
carefully, while they read the Odyssey
in selections.
The
book impresses its most important points unforgettably.
Schools were typically dependent on a single teacher, who
worked where he (or sometimes she) could find students
and a space to teach. Educational progress was a spiral
rather than a line, as students returned to texts already
used at a lower level. Although relatively few, elite
students went through all three levels, from primary
through grammatical to rhetorical education, there were
advantages to achieving mastery even at lower levels. The
book warns us against assuming that reading must come
before writing, pointing to the many examples of copying
by beginning students and the difficulty of reading texts
without word-division and punctuation. Throughout the
reader feels the author's sympathy for the ancient
teacher's insecurity and the ancient learner's
difficulties, and her constant but unobtrusive awareness
of issues of power and social hierarchy.
Gymnastics
of the Mind wears its
learning very lightly. Even students and colleagues with
no knowledge of Greek and Latin can read it with
enjoyment and learn from it. This friendly discussion,
however, will instruct even experienced scholars. Its
ability at once docere et delectare makes this an outstanding contribution to scholarship.
Ruth
Scodel
Chair,
Committee on the Goodwin Award of Merit