English Teaching within the History of Civilization

Language arts education was highly valued in ancient times, and continues to be vital in our day.

Ellwood Cubberley’s book The History of Education provides general information about schooling in ancient Greece. Education itself was not technically required in Athens, but it was necessary if a male wanted to obtain citizenship. Teachers were private tutors and “occupied but a low social position and only in the higher schools of Athens was their standing of any importance” (24).

 Weekend breaks for the students were non-existent, but community festivals and state holidays provided for interruption of  study. On a day-to-day basis, the schoolteacher provided a simple classroom, and instruction was mainly individual.

Grammatists taught schoolboys to write on “plaques of baked earth,” “wax tablets,” or parchment (26). Learning to read was not as easy as it is now in the modern word; imagine the difficult process of deciphering a sentence when “punctuation, spacing between words, and small letters had not yet  been introduced” (26)!  

Once the pupils learned how to read words, great emphasis was placed on their ability to read well. They memorized and recited much of the classic works such as Homer and Aesop, paying particular attention to accentuation and emotion. Often, boys were asked to rework a piece of literature to make it their own, memorize it, and then perform it. This way they learned to read and write simultaneously. 

One scholar explains that “The Greeks, and especially the Athenians, laid the greatest stress on reading well [and] reciting well” (30).

In today’s world, the ability to read and write remains a vital skill. Arthur Applebee delineates the development of English curriculum throughout the 19^th and 20^th century in Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A History. English as a school subject did not emerge until the 1880s. Over the years the curriculum underwent countless transformations due to changes in school population, psychology, and educational philosophy (ix).

The earliest source of language instruction during colonial times came in the form of a primer, which “included an alphabet and syllabarium, a creed, a catechism, and a collection of prayers and devotional exercises” (2). From these small books children learned to read. Later, Webster published a spelling book (3). Soon, scholars canonized classical literature for study in the classroom. 

Decades followed of debate over whether to teach grammar, rhetoric, literary history, spelling, and composition in schools. But then the question shifted to how to teach English (20) because it is a very broad, deep subject. I think that ancient Greek methods of teaching reading and writing

would prove fruitful in the contemporary classroom.