School and education in ancient Greece

In Athens, a boy did not have just one teacher. He had three, and each διδάσκαλος (teacher) taught a different subject, often in a different place. Parents chose the teachers and paid them. No law made children go to school.

The γραμματιστής taught the γράμματα, the letters. The pupil, the μαθητής, learned to read, to write and to count. Then he read the poems of Homer and learned long parts by heart. The poems praised brave heroes, and the boys were meant to become like them.

The κιθαριστής taught music. In this μάθημα (lesson), boys learned to play the λύρα, the lyre, and to sing songs by famous poets. The Greeks believed that rhythm and music made a person calm and well-behaved.

The παιδοτρίβης was the sports teacher. In the wrestling ground, the παλαίστρα, boys ran, jumped, threw the discus and the javelin, and wrestled. A strong body was part of a good education.

Every morning, a slave walked the boy to his lessons. He was called the παιδαγωγός, “the one who leads the child”. He carried the boy’s things, watched how he behaved and took him home again. He was not a teacher, but he stayed with the boy all day.

To practise writing, pupils used a wooden tablet covered with wax. They scratched letters into the wax with a pointed stylus. With the warmed flat end they smoothed the wax, and the tablet was ready to use again. Books were long rolls of papyrus, and the Greek word for them was βιβλίον.

We know about Athenian schools partly from painted pottery. A famous drinking cup by the painter Douris, now in a museum in Berlin, shows school lessons. One teacher plays the lyre with a pupil. Another holds open a roll with the first words of a poem, while a boy recites it. A third checks the writing on a pupil’s tablet. In the corner sits the paidagogos, waiting.

School cost money, so the sons of rich families learned the most. The philosopher Plato wrote that the richest boys started school youngest and stayed the longest. Many poor boys had to work with their fathers in the fields or in a workshop, so they learned much less.

Most girls did not go to school. They stayed at home and learned from their mothers how to spin wool, weave cloth and run a house. In a book by the writer Xenophon, a man says that his wife was not yet fifteen when they married, and that she knew very little about the world.

Sparta was very different. There, the city took every boy from his family at the age of seven. The boys lived together in groups and trained hard to become soldiers. They learned to obey, to stay strong and to put up with hunger and cold. This Spartan education is called the ἀγωγή.

The Greek word σχολή first meant free time or rest. Only people who did not have to work all day had time to learn. A museum in Berlin explains the Douris cup this way: the boys did not study for a job, like their paid teachers. They studied so that, as adults, they could spend their free time well, with music, poetry and good conversation. Later, σχολή also meant a talk given by a teacher, and then the group of students who listened.

After their lessons as boys, some young men wanted to learn more. In the 5th century BC, teachers called Sophists travelled from city to city and taught the art of speaking for money. In the 4th century BC, the philosopher Plato taught in the Academy, a park outside Athens. In 335 BC his former student Aristotle opened his own school, the Lyceum. Their names are still used for schools in many languages today.