Education 4000 Years Ago
Education 4000 Years Ago
Source file: Education_4000_Years_Ago.docx
Author: Marla Szwast
Created: 2018-02-08 22:32:00
Modified: 2018-02-08 23:31:00
Education 4000 Years Ago
With the beginning of written language there began to be a need for some kind of systematic education which had a purpose beyond survival. But education was not just about learning to read and write symbols that stood for words. Mathematics textbooks have been found in Samaria dating back to 2000 B.C. 1 So here we have the beginnings of school. Schools are probably at least as old as the time of Hamurabi (1792-1750 B.C) It is thought that by this time in history there was a system of schools for the elite, educating priests, scribes, and civil servants.2 There is also evidence to suggest formal schools in China during this same time period.3
Around the seventh century B.C. we begin to get a clearer picture of what education was like during this time in China. Formal education was reserved for wealthy men. There were 3 levels of education. The method was very formal, emphasizing exact memorization of text-like material. The hours were long and the teacher often had to use harsh discipline. This is perhaps the first time we see education being used to form the person into what the culture deems good. In this case the big ideas were teaching tradition, morality, and conformity.
But not all teaching was harsh with conformity as the ultimate goal. Confucius brought different ideas to education. He was the first to set up a sort of private school, where he taught basics to young men of all classes, instead of just the elite. Confucius believed that teaching was valuable in and of itself. He believed in cultivating the person by teaching them both practical and moral subjects. He taught using conversation and dialogue instead of focusing only on memorization of texts. He also taught using maxims or proverbs such as “Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous” Confucius expected his students to be the active pursuers of their own learning. He felt that learning not only sharpened the intellect but also the moral character of a person. He also believed education was central to building a strong society.
Eleanor Robson, Mesopotamian Mathematics, 2100-1600 B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999)
Murphy Madonna, The History and Philosophy of Education, Voices of Educational Pioneers (New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2006)
Ray Huang, A Brief History of Chinese Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991)
Picture Notes: A black and white rendition of the Yale Babylonian Collection's Tablet YBC 7289 (c. 1800–1600 BCE), showing a Babylonian approximation to the square root of 2 (1 24 51 10 w: sexagesimal) in the context of Pythagoras' Theorem for an isosceles triangle. The tablet also gives an example where one side of the square is 30, and the resulting diagonal is 42 25 35 or 42.4263888… All use should attribute both: mentioning http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/Euclid/ybc/ybc.html and the Yale Babylonian Collection as the original holder of the tablet. Author: Bill Casselman (mailto:cass@math.ubc.ca)