Education in ancient Greece

Although the over 1,500 city-states in ancient Greece differed greatly in their approaches to life, they had one important goal in common: preparing their children for adult citizenship. Despite this common goal, each city-state focused on different educational goals, with predominant city-states such as Athens and Sparta taking radically different approaches. Military city-state Sparta worked to produce soldier-citizens, while democratic city-state Athens focused on developing citizens trained in both peace and war. Greek philosophers, such as Socrates and Plato, helped to lay the foundation of Western philosophy and science and introduced the concepts of the rights of citizens, democracy, and freedom of speech and religion. Hippocrates has been deemed the father of Western medicine, and mathematicians and scientists including Aristotle, Archimedes, and Eratosthenes established the criteria for exploring and understanding the natural world. The Greeks’ relationships with their humanized gods enhanced the spirituality of human beings.

Background

In most Greek city-states except Sparta, Greek boys were formally educated in schools, while Greek girls were given domestic educations at home. Girls who did learn to read and write were taught by their mothers in the confines of their own courtyards. Generally, women spent their entire lives confined to their homes, except in Sparta, where citizen women were freer to move around because their husbands did not live at home. The hetaerae, or courtesans, were the most highly educated women, attending special schools to learn how to be entertaining and intellectually challenging companions to the affluent men who could afford them.

In ancient Athens, boys from ages six to fourteen went to a neighborhood primary school or a private school with tuition priced low enough to enable poor boys to attend. Most Greek schools had fewer than twenty boys enrolled and often held classes outdoors. At age thirteen or fourteen, the poorer boys ended their formal education and were directed into an apprenticeship at a trade. The philosopher-teachers taught the more affluent boys.

The parents of Spartan boys sent them to military school at age six or seven, where they were placed in sternly disciplined groups supervised by a hierarchy of officers. From age seven to eighteen, they progressed through an incrementally severe training course in which reading and writing were considered secondary to learning military skills. Between the ages of eighteen and twenty, Spartan boys had to pass a rigorous fitness, military ability, and leadership skills test. After passing the test, they joined the state militia, living in barracks instead of with their families. When they reached age sixty, they could retire and live with their families.

Sparta also provided training beyond the domestic arts for girls, sending them to school between ages six and seven, where they lived and trained in barracks. Girls were also required to pass a rigorous skills and fitness test at age eighteen and after successfully passing were assigned husbands and sent back home. Both boys and girls failing the test lost their citizenship rights and joined the perioikos, or middle class.

Overview

Greek education and educators have left lasting imprints on modern education, including classical art, medicine, and philosophy. Many symbols used in physics and higher math equations derive from the Greek alphabet. Eratosthenes, from the third century BCE, used math and physics principles to arrive at an approximation of the earth’s circumference. About the same time, Archimedes discovered the principle that submerging a solid object displaces an amount of liquid matching the weight of the object. Aristotle developed the idea that organisms and institutions follow patterns and progress toward their natural purposes. Acorns develop into oak trees and human babies grow into human adults. Following this logic, he concluded that the end product of education is a civilized adult.

The fifth century BCE marked significant changes in the Greek world, including the defeat of the Persians, the rise of Athens and democracy, and the evolution of philosophy. Aristotle explained the change by pointing out that before and after the Persian wars, the Greeks pursued all kinds of education and ignored the practical demands of life. Special teachers in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire called Sophists used philosophy and rhetoric to teach excellence in various subjects. The Sophists focused on the mind of the individual in contrast to the mind of the community as in previous education, and they turned the attention of the Greeks away from fitting into the social unit as the goal of the individual to the social unit existing for the individual. Practical life became a vehicle to the higher life of the mind. The balance between gymnastics and music was destroyed, and the intellect became emphasized over the body as physical education became a prelude to cultured leisure. Aesthetic enjoyment took the place of civil duty, and happiness became more important in education.

From the fifth century BCE well into the nineteenth century CE, the Greek and Roman conception of a classical education dominated and shaped the Western world. There were seven liberal arts divided into two groups: the trivium and the quadrivium. The trivium, or the verbal arts, was composed of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The quadrivium, or the mathematical arts, was made up of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Each century redefined the concept of a classical education, and by the end of the eighteenth century, the definition of a classical education included studying literature, poetry, drama, philosophy, history, art, and language. Today, a classical education means an expansive study of the liberal arts and sciences.

Greek educational ideas are discernible in Western classical education, which is divided into three distinctive parts that roughly coordinate with the individual student’s development. Primary education, often called the trivium, consists of grammar, logic, and rhetoric and is designed to teach students how to learn. Secondary education teaches a framework of concepts that hold all human knowledge, and then it fills in basic knowledge and develops the basis of every major human activity. Tertiary education prepares a student for an educated profession in fields such as law, theology, medicine, or science.

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