The beginning of an historical education

One book has been read, and now another's picked up: H.I. Marrou's A History of Education in Antiquity.

The original copyright is printed as 1956, and the book's age shows. I'm not currently reading many academic texts, but there's a certain formal conversation air to the prose that betrays its age. Its constant reference to the early middle ages as a "dark age," also gives away that it was written over fifty years ago.

Nonetheless, good scholarship stands the test of time, and this book was given to me by a professor while I was at the University of Victoria. This professor handed it off to me saying that it's a classic text about, well, the history of education, and that it gives a good indication of why the Western (North American?) educational system is the way it is today.

Having read the introduction, two things are clear.

First, sports and the acclaim given to those who excel in them is nothing new. Marrou quickly, yet persuasively, posits that this is so through to today because Western warrior societies preceded more administrative ones. Therefore, the primarily physical education of warriors is seated much more deeply than the primary education of scribes. The thesis underlying this trend is the second thing that Marrou has made clear.

An educational system isn't something that can simply be transposed onto a society, it is a reflection of the epitome of a society. Whatever a society values and strives for is what will be taught to its youth, a very straightforward idea. But, Marrou adds a caveat: a society must already know what it values to create a truly successful educational system. As a result of this requirement, ancient education systems were never cemented until after their respective civilizations had reached their peak.

With this second idea in mind, it's much less surprising that our own (North American/Canadian) educational system (in terms of its goals and ideal outcomes) appears to be broken. As a society (or, to use Marrou's word: "civilization"), we don't really know what we want - we have no real zenith because whatever it had been before the internet came about has been blown to pieces. The speed at which society, culture, and systems of living are changing because of technology also put a strain on having the sort of system that Marrou writes of.

Nonetheless, any root has to connect to its branch somehow. It might sound academic and dry, but I'm genuinely excited to see what the near past can tell me about the ancient past.