The book, which started its journey as a research article but later turned into a book, examines the educational problems experienced in the Music Departments of Fine Arts High Schools in Turkey through the views of the music teachers working in this school in a provincial city and discusses the results with a generalizable approach, mainly from the perspective of music teaching. Although Fine Arts High Schools have been extensively studied in the music education literature, studies focused on the problems experienced in these schools are quite limited. The data of the study were obtained from a single study group instead of a sample selected from the population. Some problems are strongly related to the socio-cultural and socio-economic variables surrounding the school. These two justifications should be interpreted as the results are not generalizable. However, it should be emphasized that some of the results obtained in this study regarding common and non-intervening elements for all Fine Arts High Schools in Turkey such as the criteria for appointment of administrators, teacher-student selection method, curriculums, and textbooks may be generalizable. In this context, the study is considered important in terms of drawing attention to the current problems experienced in these schools and providing results that will help to make a comparison between the school where the research was conducted and other Fine Arts High Schools.

In undertaking to treat of Aristotle as the expounder of ancient educational ideas, I might, with Kapp’s Aristoteles’ Staatspaedagogik before me, have made my task an easy one. I might simply have presented in an orderly way and with a little commentary, what is to be found on the subject of education in his various works—Politics, Ethics, Rhetoric, Poetics, etc. I had two reasons, however, for not adopting this course: (1) that this work had been done, better than I could do it, in the treatise referred to, and (2) that a mere restatement of what Aristotle says on education would hardly have shown his relation to ancient pedagogy as a whole. I therefore judged it better, by tracing briefly the whole history of Greek education up to Aristotle and down from Aristotle, to show the past which conditioned his theories and the future which was conditioned by them. Only thus, it seemed to me, could his teachings be seen in their proper light. And I have found that this method has many advantages, of which I may mention one. It has enabled me to show the close connection that existed at all times between Greek education and Greek social and political life, and to present the one as the reflection of the other. And this is no small advantage, since it is just from its relation to the whole of life that Greek education derives its chief interest for us. We can never, indeed, return to the purely political education of the Greeks; they themselves had to abandon that, and, since then,

A boundless hope has passed across the earth—

a hope which gives our education a meaning and a scope far wider than any that the State aims at; but in these days, when the State and the institution which embodies that hope are contending for the right to educate, it cannot but aid us in settling their respective claims, to follow the process by which they came to have distinct claims at all, and to see just what these mean. This process, the method which I have followed has, I hope, enabled me, in some degree, to bring into clearness. This, at all events, has been one of my chief aims.

…

THOMAS DAVIDSON

“Glenmore,”

Keene, Essex Co., N.Y.

October, 1891.