Institutio Oratoria - On Education

On Education

“My aim, then, is the education of the perfect orator” (Quintilianus, 1.Preface.9). Book I of Institutio Oratoria discusses at length the proper method of training an orator, virtually from birth. This focus on early and comprehensive education was in many ways a reflection of Quintilian’s career; Emperor Vespasian’s influence on the official status of education marked the period as one of conscientious education. Quintilian’s contribution to this line of thought, aside from his long career as a public educator, was the opening of his text, and it is regarded as a highlight of the discussion:

“Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria is a landmark in the history of Roman education: it is the culmination of a long development, and it had no successor … teacher was found who could speak with Quintilian’s authority, no orator sufficiently interested in the theory of his art to produce a second de Oratore” (Gwynn, 242).

His theory of education is one area in which Quintilian differs from Cicero. Cicero called for a broad, general education; Quintilian was more focused. He lays out the educational process step by step, from “hav a father conceive the highest hopes of his son from the moment of his birth” (Quintilianus, 1.1.1). Other concerns are that the child’s nurse should speak well (“The ideal according to Chrysippus, would be that she should be a philosopher” (1.1.4)), and that both the parents and the teachers of the child should be well-educated. With respect to the parents, Quintilian “do not restrict this remark to fathers alone” (1.1.6); a well-educated mother is regarded as an asset to the growing orator. Quintilian also presents a wide review of suitable literary examples, and this work is also an important work of literary criticism. While he clearly favors certain writers, his fairness is notable, as even writers, such as Sallust, an influential practitioner of the sort of style that Quintilian opposed, are afforded some consideration. Above all, Quintilian holds up Cicero as an example of a great writer and orator.

Quintilian discusses many issues of education that are still relevant today. He believed that education should be begun early, as mentioned above, but also that it should be pleasurable for the child. “Above all things we must take care that the child, who is not yet old enough to love his studies, does not come to hate them and dread the bitterness which he had once tasted, even when the years of infancy are left behind. His studies must be made an amusement” (1.1.20). The proliferation of educational toys available for pre-school aged children shows that this view still has power. He also examines the various pros and cons of public schooling versus homeschooling, eventually coming out in favour of public school, so long as it is a good school. His view is that public schools teach social skills along with their studies, and a student would benefit more from this than from studying in seclusion. One must note, however, that Quintilian makes a point of declaring that “a good teacher will not burden himself with a larger number of pupils than he can manage, and it is further of the very first importance that he should be on only friendly and intimate terms with us and make his teaching not a duty but a labor of love” (1.2.15).

Quintilian’s most arresting point about the growing orator, however, is that he should be educated in morality above all else. To Quintilian, only a good man could be an orator. This is another aspect where he differs from Cicero, or rather pushes further Cicero’s injunction that an orator should be a good man. Quintilian quite literally believed that an evil man could not be an orator, “or the orator’s aim is to carry conviction, and we trust those only whom we know to be worthy of our trust” (Gwynn, 231). This was quite possibly a reaction to the corrupt and dissolute times in which Quintilian lived; he may have attributed the decline in the role of the orator to the decline in public morality. Only a man free from vice could concentrate on the exacting study of oratory. But “the good man does not always speak the truth or even defend the better cause…what matters is not so much the act as the motive” (Clarke, 117). Therefore, Quintilian’s good orator is personally good, but not necessarily publicly good.