History of Education: Greek, Renaissance, and Modern Eras

Introduction: Three Eras of Educational Evolution

Education has evolved substantially over the centuries. This paper examines three distinct periods: ancient Greece during the classical and Hellenistic eras (500–30 BCE), the Renaissance from roughly 1400 to 1550 CE, and the modern educational landscape of the 1970s in America. Greek education was rooted almost entirely in an oral rhetorical tradition. The Renaissance revived that tradition, grounding it in newly codified written works of Greek and Roman thinkers. The 1970s, in turn, retained many traditional oral instructional methods while absorbing a wave of new ideas into the educational system. Throughout all three periods, the evolving role of women in education is a central thread — from marginal fringe teaching in ancient Greece, to the pioneering work of individual women in the Renaissance, to women becoming the dominant presence in modern classrooms.

During much of the historical period associated with the Greek tradition of education, the guiding principles of rhetoric ruled the day. Most educational pursuits surrounded the art of public speaking, since the transmission of ideas was largely an oral tradition. It was not until the emergence of figures like Aristotle and Plato that ideas were committed to writing, and formal education began to adopt writing as a key institution.

Ancient Greek Education and the Rhetorical Tradition

The Homeric poems portray Greek society before the introduction of writing — a society that had its own oral poetry, the songs of bards on heroic or mythological subjects. How such poetry was created and transmitted is now reasonably well understood from the study of modern oral poets in the Balkans and other areas (Kennedy 5).

Aristotle also developed a tradition of rhetoric in which most students were not expected to learn to write; instead, they were expected to develop attentive listening and response skills associated with the rhetorical style of education. Classical rhetoricians later became interested in defining the species of oratory — when speeches are employed and how they differ according to function. Beginning with Aristotle, the standard classification was into deliberative, judicial, and epideictic forms. Deliberative rhetoric was concerned with determining the advantages of some future action; judicial rhetoric with determining the justice or legality of a past action; and epideictic rhetoric with the praise or blame of what was honorable or dishonorable (Kennedy 7).

Although writings helped transmit ideas across distance and time, writing was not considered the center of education the way a textbook might be seen today. Plato, for example, criticizes writing at the end of the Phaedrus on the grounds that it destroys memory and that a written text cannot defend itself in dialogue (Kennedy 13). The general consensus was that writing created a faulty memory in the student, who would set aside ideas to be read at a later date rather than assimilating them or developing them further.

The tradition of Greek education left little room for egalitarian principles. Women were an unlikely recipient of formal education, and there were no recognized female educators of note. Yet there is evidence of at least some fringe educators and rhetorical speakers among women of the period.

Women in Ancient Greece and the Limits of Inclusion

Women rarely spoke in public in classical Greece, but there is some evidence of their rhetorical skills and their voices in ancient society. The ancient Greek woman best known directly from her own words is Sappho of Lesbos. She wrote lyric poetry on themes of love and marriage in the first half of the sixth century BCE — over a century before the first writing about rhetoric — and she may have directed a kind of finishing school for young girls. Her poetry was greatly admired in antiquity. The grammarians of Alexandria included her works in their canons of classical poetry, and extensive fragments have been recovered in modern times from papyri written in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Her works, however, were not copied into codex manuscripts in the early Middle Ages, perhaps because of Christian distaste for homosexual love, and are thus known to us only from the chance survival of papyri and from quotations by male authors of the Roman period (Kennedy 15).

As is true of most contemporary societies, though women were sporadically included in at least marginal education, the actual equal education of women in Greece did not officially begin until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Male teachers first began to fight for equal education for women, and then women themselves began to demand it, eventually leading to their inclusion in higher education — a development likely linked to the strong classical notion that women were not acceptable public speakers (Pantziara 28).

In the nineteenth century, women entered Greek universities for the first time, and female writers began to appear in respected publications such as Artemis (1866), Thaleia (1867), and Eurydice (1870–73). Emerging Greek women writers — including Calliope Kehagia, Sophia Laskaridou, Sebasti Callisperi, Sappho Leontias, and Penelope Lazaridou — reflected the concerns of women of their time (Pantziara 28).

Conclusion: From Rhetoric to Reform

The modern expression of education through ideals such as hands-on learning and project- or portfolio-based learning — which acknowledge that learning styles differ among people, not just between men and women — did not begin until the 1980s and 1990s, but the 1970s transformed the education system. These approaches stand in deliberate contrast to the "banking" model of education, in which lecture is emphasized and teacher and learner do not genuinely interact. More recently, the current challenges to the banking model have been complicated by the introduction of accountability-based education, in which knowledge is again judged by the ability to reiterate it in written form on a standardized test. Nevertheless, the changes that began in the 1970s produced a diversity in education and among educators not previously present, and both men and women continue to be instrumental in that ongoing effort.