History of education

A form of education for adolescents became necessary in all societies that had an alphabet and engaged in commerce. In Western Europe, formal secondary education can be traced back to the Athenian educational reforms of 320BC. Though their civilisation was eclipsed and they were enslaved, Hellenistic Athenian teachers were valued in the Roman system. The Roman and Hellenistic schools of rhetoric taught the seven liberal arts and sciences – grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy – which were regarded as a preparation for the study at a tertiary level of theology, law and medicine. Boys would have been prepared to enter these schools by private tutors at home. Girls would have only received tuition at home.

England provides a good case study. When Augustine of Canterbury brought Christianity there in 597, no schools existed. He needed trained priests to conduct church services and boys to sing in the choir. He had to create both the grammar schools that taught Latin, to enable the English to study for the priesthood, and song schools that trained the 'sons of gentlefolk' to sing in cathedral choirs. In the case of Canterbury and Rochester, both still exist. Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People tells that the Canterbury school taught more than the 'intended reading and understanding of Latin', but 'the rules of metric.