476 HUMAN BIOLOGY 



The next stage of development appeared when tribal 

 life became complicated because of marked divisions of labor, 

 each demanding some special mode of skill and knowledge. 

 Without going into detail, we may point out that there was a 

 division in two directions. On the one hand, there were the 

 medicine men, later differentiated into physicans and the 

 priesthood, and on the other hand, the secular useful arts. 

 The former possessed the "higher learning;" they were the 

 guardians of the mysteries upon which depended personal 

 health and the well-being and prosperity of the group. 

 All the data show what pains were taken to select the 

 young men who showed special aptitude for these callings, 

 and the careful discipline they underwent. The other phase 

 gradually developed into regular apprenticeship by which 

 skill in making needed tools, utensils, furnishings weapons, 

 etc., was transmitted. Even this brief account would be 

 incomplete, however, if we did not note that the division of 

 labor between men and women brought about a marked 

 differences in the training of boys and girls. 



This bare outline is intended merely to indicate how progress 

 in civilization went hand and hand with and depended 

 upon a corresponding advance in educational instrumen- 

 talities; because in indicating the background out of which 

 schools finally developed at least among the peoples from 

 whom we derive our own culture, it suggests how recent and 

 new are the agencies we today associate with the word 

 "education." For no estimate of the possible influence of 

 education can be made that does not start from the fact 

 that education as we know it today is an affair of almost the 

 last century. The custom of apprenticeship in the mechanical 

 and utilitarian arts for the mass, the reservation of higher 

 education to the select few, the influence of "the mysteries" 

 upon higher education, the sharp separation of educational 

 aims, methods and subject-matter as between men and 

 women, persisted almost to our own day. The idea, of 

 educational agencies and opportunities for everybody, having 

 a common content, and the idea of an educational ladder by 

 which, in theory at least, all could come to share in the higher 

 skills and knowledge is a new thing in human history. 

 Recollection of this fact would quiet some of our impatient 



