A rough schooling

One of my clearest memories of high school is my ancient history teacher telling us that the ancient Greeks could solve the riddle of the lying and the truthful guards by the time they were our age. Considering this particular teacher spent the bulk of that semester teaching Greek history, it seems now (and at the time) that he was a little too interested in ancient Greece. 

Although it's only about primary education, Marrou paints a very different picture of what ancient Greek students could do. He notes that children learned the three R's under great duress. Teachers almost literally hammered these skills into their pupils' minds. 

For the ancient primary method was to teach students the hardest elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic first so that learning everything else would be a stroll through the roses. However, this method took nothing from the students' perspective into consideration. If you couldn't learn the hardest parts of reading, writing, and arithmetic from the direct, copy-what-the-teacher-writes-and-demonstrates method, then there was clearly something wrong with you. 

At the same time, Marrou notes that it wasn't uncommon (even for people who became politically important later in life) to be thirteen and not know your letters. Also that some people reached the age of nine without being able to even write their own name. Perhaps most surprisingly, he also points out that even the most intellectual of Greeks from the Hellenistic era apparently had trouble mentally adding numbers together. 

All of Marrou's revelations about what seem to be deficiencies in the Hellenistic education system and its results don't necessarily make my high school teacher's assertion invalid. The Hellenistic education system sounds pretty terrible for the basics, but it could still be excellent in its teaching of logic and problem solving. Perhaps Marrou will confirm this guess when he covers Hellenistic secondary education in the next chapter.