History of education

• 1. Introduction

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  The history of education stretches back at least as far as the earliest written records recovered from ancient civilizations. Before there were schools as we recognize them, there were scribes in Mesopotamia who spent years mastering cuneiform script, and priests in Egypt who guarded literacy like a state secret. Around 2061-2010 BC, under a treasurer named Kheti serving the pharaoh Mentuhotep II, Egypt developed what historians consider the earliest known formal school. That single fact raises a cascade of questions. Why did schools emerge when they did? Who was allowed in, and who was kept out? How did education travel from palace courtyards and monastery cells to become the mass compulsory system that Prussia introduced around 1800 to, in the government's own words, produce more soldiers and more obedient citizens? And why did some societies treat literacy as a gift to be spread freely, while others made it deliberately harder to acquire? This documentary follows those questions across five thousand years and every inhabited continent.

• 2. Scribes and Secrets

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  In Mesopotamia, the logographic cuneiform system took so many years to master that only a narrow slice of society was ever trained in it. Royal offspring, sons of the wealthy, and sons of professionals such as physicians and temple administrators were the ones who attended scribe schools. Most boys learned their father's trade instead. Girls stayed home to learn housekeeping and childcare. Yet the story did not stay frozen there. As syllabic writing spread and became more accessible, Babylonian society shifted. Libraries appeared in most towns and temples. Women as well as men learned to read and write, and for Semitic Babylonians this meant acquiring knowledge of the older Sumerian language, which had already died as a spoken tongue. Teachers compiled vocabularies, grammars, and interlinear translations for students. One old Sumerian proverb caught the spirit of the whole enterprise: 'he who would excel in the school of the scribes must rise with the dawn.'

  Ancient Egypt took a different path. The hieroglyph system was already difficult to learn, and in later centuries it was deliberately made harder still, explicitly to protect the status of those who already knew it. Literacy in ancient Egypt is estimated at somewhere between 1 and 5 percent of the population, though scholars caution that this figure almost certainly undercounts urban dwellers and that 19th and 20th-century attitudes have long biased estimates of ancient and medieval literacy downward. In Mesopotamia's Old Babylonian scribe schools, known by the Sumerian term edubba and active roughly between 2000 and 1600 BC, massive archives of student tablets have been recovered. Those archives include the earliest known versions of The Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem whose Sumerian form dates to the Third Dynasty of Ur, somewhere between 2150 and 2000 BC. King Ashurbanipal of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, who lived from around 685 to 627 BC, was so proud of his own scribal training that he boasted of it; his education had included oil divination, mathematics, reading, and writing alongside horsemanship and hunting. He later gathered cuneiform texts from across Mesopotamia into a library at Nineveh, the first systematically organized library in the ancient Middle East, portions of which survive today.

• 3. Competing Philosophies

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  Confucius, born in 551 BC and dead by 479 BC, left a mark on Chinese education that lasted roughly two thousand years. During the Zhou dynasty (1045-256 BC), schools already taught six arts: rites, music, archery, charioteering, calligraphy, and mathematics. Boys learned ritual arts and dance from age twelve and archery and chariot driving when older; girls learned ritual, deportment, silk production, and weaving. Confucius gave this tradition a philosophical backbone, and the imperial examination system that formalized his influence ran continuously from 605 AD, when it was first explicitly instituted during the Sui dynasty, until 1911, when it was abolished in favor of Western educational methods. Any male adult in China could theoretically sit the examination regardless of wealth or social rank, though under some dynasties merchants were barred. In practice, since preparation was costly and time-consuming, most successful candidates came from the landowning gentry. Still, the source notes there are vast numbers of historical examples of individuals who rose from low social standing to high government office through examination success alone.

  In ancient India, the Vedic tradition and the Buddhist tradition ran in parallel and with distinct structures. A Brahman male in the Vedic system began religious study at age 8 to 12; a child in the Buddhist system started at eight. The Vedic curriculum included the four Vedas, the six Vedangas covering ritualistic knowledge, metrics, exegetics, grammar, phonetics, and astronomy, as well as the Upanishads. The oldest Upanishads date from around 700 BC and were described as wisdom teachings, encouraging an exploratory search for truth in which teachers and students were equal co-travelers. The Gurukula system housed students in the teacher's home or a monastery, and students from wealthy families paid a voluntary tribute called Gurudakshina upon completing their studies as a mark of respect. The Buddhist curriculum organized its material around the Pitakas: the Vinaya Pitaka governing monastic discipline, the Sutta Pitaka preserving the Buddha's sermons in five collections, and the Abhidhamma Pitaka offering analysis of Buddhist doctrine.

  In ancient Greece, the contrast between Athens and Sparta illustrated two completely opposite visions of what education was for. In Sparta, boys were taken from their homes at seven and placed in military dormitories where they were trained in sports, endurance, and fighting with harsh discipline, and little else. In Athens during the 5th and 4th centuries BC, beyond two years of military training, the state left schooling almost entirely alone. Anyone could open a school and set the curriculum. Parents chose based on what subjects they wanted and what monthly fees they could manage. Even poor families typically sent their sons for at least a few years. By around 350 BC, Athenian schools also taught drawing, painting, and sculpture. The richest students continued to sophists for rhetoric, mathematics, geography, natural history, politics, and logic; and some attended the Lyceum founded by Aristotle of Stageira or the Platonic Academy founded by Plato of Athens.

• 4. The Church as Classroom

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  During the Early Middle Ages, the monasteries of the Roman Catholic Church were the dominant centers of education across Europe. Cathedral schools and monastic schools ran for hundreds of years before universities formally emerged from them; the earliest traces of these proto-university institutions date to the early 6th century. The University of Bologna, founded in 1088, holds the distinction of being the oldest university in continuous operation in the world. The University of Paris followed in 1160 with a Christian foundation. The University of Naples Federico II, established in 1224 by Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, became the world's oldest state-funded university in continuous operation.

  Charlemagne, King of the Franks from 768 to 814 AD, drove one of the most deliberate expansions of learning in medieval Europe. He studied grammar under Paul the Deacon, rhetoric and astronomy under Alcuin, and arithmetic under Einhard. He invited the English monk Alcuin to his court at Aachen, bringing the Latin education tradition of Northumbrian monasteries back into the Frankish kingdom. In a capitulary of 797, Charlemagne ordered priests to establish schools in every town and village and explicitly required that no fee be charged to children whose parents could not pay voluntarily. Most surviving works of classical Latin were copied and preserved by Carolingian scholars during this period.

  The Third Lateran Council of 1179 formalized the Church's educational obligation, mandating that every cathedral assign a master to teach boys too poor to pay regular fees. In 1120, Dunfermline Abbey in Scotland, by order of Malcolm Canmore and his Queen Margaret, established what is recorded as the first high school in the United Kingdom. Ireland in this period earned a reputation as the island of saints and scholars, with monasteries becoming centers of learning across the island. The Synod of Whitby in 664 AD officially replaced Celtic church practices with Roman ones, but the Anglo-Celtic artistic style survived, its most famous product being the Lindisfarne Gospels. The Venerable Bede, who lived from 673 to 735, wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731, in a Northumbrian monastery.

• 5. Islam and the House of Wisdom

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  Muslims began formal schooling in 622 in Medina, initially inside mosques. The first separate school was the Nizamiyah, built in 1066 in Baghdad, where children started from age six with free tuition. The Islamic world's educational expansion tracked the civilization's geographic reach, stretching from China to Spain between the 7th and 19th centuries. The University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fes, Morocco, originally a mosque built in 859, is recognized by UNESCO and Guinness World Records as the oldest existing continuously operating degree-awarding educational institution in the world.

  Baghdad's House of Wisdom, active from the 9th to the 13th centuries, was simultaneously a library, a translation center, and an educational hub. Scholars there drew on Persian, Indian, and Greek texts, including works by Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Euclid, Galen, and the Indian mathematicians Aryabhata and Brahmagupta. The city of Baghdad itself held a population of over a million at this time, the largest in its era. In the 9th century, Bimaristan medical schools began issuing diplomas to qualified students of Islamic medicine. Al-Azhar University, founded in Cairo in 975, offered post-graduate degrees and taught Islamic law, jurisprudence, Arabic grammar, Islamic astronomy, and early Islamic philosophy.

  In the 15th and 16th centuries, Timbuktu in present-day Mali became a major Islamic center of learning. Students came from as far as the Middle East to study at Sankore University and other madrasas there. The town accumulated an estimated 100,000 or more manuscripts, some dating from pre-Islamic times and the 12th century, with contents covering astronomy, music, and botany. The Ahmed Baba centre alone has collected more than 18,000 of these manuscripts. Aryabhata's mathematical work, the Aryabhatiya, written in the 5th century, was translated into Arabic around 820 AD by Al-Khwarizmi, creating a direct channel through which Indian mathematical ideas, including approximations of pi and positional notation, entered the broader Islamic and eventually European scholarly world.

• 6. Mass Schooling and the Modern State

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  Prussia introduced mass compulsory schooling around 1800 with an explicitly political purpose: to produce more soldiers and more obedient citizens. The Reformation had already shifted the educational balance in northern Europe, with clerical instruction giving way to elementary schooling and, in Scotland, the national Church setting out a program of parish-by-parish schooling in January 1561 with an Act of Parliament passing in 1633 to fund it through taxation. In Poland, 1773 saw the establishment of a Commission of National Education, the first government ministry of education in any European country.

  In Imperial Russia, the 1897 census counted literate people at just 28 percent of the population. There was a strong university network for the upper class and little else. Vladimir Lenin proclaimed in 1919 that the abolition of illiteracy was the major aim of the Soviet government. A system of universal compulsory education was built. Millions of adults enrolled in special literacy schools. Youth groups including Komsomol members and Young Pioneers were mobilized to teach. By 1926, the literacy rate had climbed to 56.6 percent. By 1937, census data recorded 86 percent literacy for men and 65 percent for women, for a combined rate of 75 percent. The Soviet expansion accelerated sharply during the First Five-Year Plan, motivated by Stalin's goal of building an industrial and internationally competitive state.

  In France, Jules Ferry, holding the office of Minister of Public Instruction in the 1880s, made all children under fifteen, both boys and girls, legally required to attend school. Schools were made free and secular, with the explicit goal of breaking the hold of the Catholic Church and monarchism over the young. Japan's rapid transformation came after 1868, when reformers set the country on a course of modernization that included building a public education system modeled on Western Europe. After Japan's example, the 20th century saw the Chinese Communist Party in the 1950s oversee rapid expansion of primary education, redesigning the curriculum to emphasize practical skills, and citing the eradication of illiteracy as necessary, in Chinese government sources' own words, 'to open the way for development of productivity and technical and cultural revolution.' The intertwining of mass literacy and state economic ambition, visible from Prussia to the Soviet Union to mid-century China, remained the most consistent engine of educational expansion in the modern era.