Educational History of Europe

Educational History of Europe

Europe has been in the support of education from the start. We can get that idea from the ancient greece where the athenians used to live. If we look into the  history we can find some soild examples of them being pro educationalists. When a boy was old enough he was sent to school in charge of an old slave called a pedagogue (a Greek word meaning "leader of a child"). There were no schools maintained by the State. Besides studying music and learning to read and write, the pupil memorized many passages from the old poets, and here and there a boy with a good memory could repeat the entire Iliad and Odyssey. On the other hand, there was no instruction in mathematics, geography, or natural science. We have to keep in mind that these were ancient times and it was nothing compared to our system of education but still it was pretty impresive in those times. Apart from schools they also had a good grip on athletics If the wealth and station of a student’s family permitted, the Athenian youth spent much of his time on the new athletic fields. The chief events in the famous athletic contests at Olympia (97) were boxing, wrestling, running, jumping, casting the javelin, and throwing the disk. To these, other contests were afterward added, especially chariot and horseback races.

 

Books and Reading were also getting common in the society.  Books had come to take an important place in the life of Athens. There were also some libraries built for the citizens In the Athenian citizen's library were Homer and the works of the old classic poets. They were written on long rolls of papyrus as much as a hundred and fifty or sixty feet in length. Besides literary works, all sorts of books of instruction began to appear. The sculptors wrote of their art, and there was a large group of books on medicine bearing the name of Hippocrates. Textbooks on mathematics and rhetoric circulated, and the Athenian housekeeper could even find a cookbook at the bookshop.

Under such influences there had grown up at Athens a large group of intelligent men. They constantly shared in the tasks and problems of city government, and they also had the daily opportunity of coming in contact with the greatest works of art in literature, drama, painting, architecture, and sculpture. Very different from the old Athens of the days before the repulse of the Persians, the new Athens had become a wonderful community such as the ancient world had never known before.

During the Early Middle Ages, the monasteries of the Roman Catholic Church were the centers of education and literacy, preserving the Church's selection from Latin learning and maintaining the art of writing. Prior to their formal establishment, many medieval universities were run for hundreds of years as Christian monastic schools, in which monks taught classes, and later as cathedral schools.

Fast forward to renaissance which took place in the early 1400 changed the history of the world.

the Renaissance which was cultural, political, scientific and intellectual explosion in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries, represents perhaps the most profoundly important period in human development since the fall of Ancient Rome. From its origins in 14th-century Florence, the Renaissance spread across Europe.Italy in the 14th century was fertile ground for a cultural revolution. The Black Death had wiped out millions of people in Europe – by some estimates killing as many as one in three between 1346 and 1353. By the simplest laws of economics, it meant that those who survived were left with proportionally greater wealth: either from fewer people inheriting more, or simply by virtue of supply and demand – with fewer workers available, wages naturally rose. Italy was flooded with “lost” classics from the ancient world, and artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael and Donatello took their tales, heroes and gods as a starting point to creating extraordinary art. 

Even as our world shrank in size and significance when placed in the context of our new understanding of the universe, so it grew in physical terms, as new continents were found, new lands colonised, new cultures discovered whose own beliefs and understandings were added to the great intellectual firestorm raging across Europe. 

Than this that happend in those times still exist today as a role model for us. Through learning about the past we get some interesting ideas of what might happen in the future if we continue to make mistakes as the ancient peoples did, but apart from that, we also get a good lesson from them.

There is no denial that the renaissance paved a lot of ways for the intellectuals but it also made some very crucuial changes to our planet. After the industrial revolution we have been experiencing a sudden boost in our atmosphere in the shape of global warming. The industrial revolution has been highly critcised by the early romanticists, which believed that the industrial revolution should have never came, they thought that it took humans away from the nature and towards their obomination. The industrial revolution also imposed some positive impacts In our society. Industrialization marked a shift to powered, special-purpose machinery, factories and mass production. The iron industries, along with the development of the steam engine, played central roles in the Industrial Revolution, which also saw improved systems of transportation, communication and banking.

The philosophy of ancient greek philosophers also exists today such as Socrates, Aristotle and Plato. Because philosophy touches so many subjects and, especially, because many of its methods can be used in any field. The study of philosophy helps us to enhance our ability to solve problems, our communication skills, our persuasive powers, and our writing skills.

The Early education of Europe starts from the Ancient Athens. Until the age 6 or 7 the kids of the athens and When a boy was old enough he was sent to school in charge of an old slave called a pedagogue (a Greek word meaning "leader of a child"). There were no schools maintained by the State. School was conducted in his own house by some poor citizen, who was much looked down upon. He received his pay from the parents. Besides studying music and learning to read and write, the pupil memorized many passages from the old poets, and here and there a boy with a good memory could repeat the entire Iliad and Odyssey. On the other hand, there was no instruction in mathematics, geography, or natural science.

Athletics.

 If the wealth and station of his family per- mitted, the Athenian youth spent much of his time on the new athletic fields. On the north of Athens was the field known as the Academy. There was a similar athletic ground, called the Lyceum, on the east of the city. The later custom of holding courses of lectures in these places resulted in giving the words "academy" and "lyceum" the associations they now possess for us. The chief events in the famous athletic contests at Olympia (97) were boxing, wrestling, running, jumping, casting the javelin, and throwing the disk. To these, other contests were afterward added, especially chariot and horseback races.

Higher Education offered by the Sophists.

 On the other hand, there were serious-minded young men who spent their time on other things. Many a bright youth who had finished his music, reading, and writing at the old-fashioned private school annoyed his father by insisting that such schooling was not enough and by demanding money to pay for a course of lectures delivered by more modern private teachers called Sophists, a class of new and clever lecturers who wandered from city to city. In the lectures of the Sophists a higher education was for the first time open to young men. In the first place, the Sophists taught rhetoric and oratory with great success ; fathers who had no gift of speech had the pleasure of seeing their sons practiced public speakers. It was through the teaching of the Sophists also that the first successful writing of Greek prose began. In addition they taught mathematics and astronomy, and the young men of Athens for the first time began to learn a little natural science. When a father of that day found in the hands of his son a book by one of the great Sophists which began with a statement questioning the existence of the gods, the new teachings seemed impious. The old-fashioned citizen could at least vote for the banishment of such impious teachers and burning of their books.

THE RENAISSANCE

Never before (or since) had there been such a coming together of art, science and philosophy. And never before had there been such an opportunity for it to be so widely disseminated. 

The very same scientific advances that the Renaissance was developing also contributed to one of its great legacies: the printing press. 

In 1440, Gutenberg introduced the printing press to the world – meaning that for the first time, books could be mass-produced. A single press could churn out 3,600 pages a day, resulting in an explosion of literature and ideas unprecedented in history. 

By 1500, printing presses in Western Europe had produced more than 20 million volumes. And by 1600, that had risen to 200 million. 

Luther and Erasmus became bestsellers – and later so did poets, dramatists and novelists. The new ideas of free-thinkers, mathematicians and scientists all became accessible to the masses, and art and science became, for the first time in human history, truly democratic. 

The seeds of the modern world were sown and grown in the Renaissance. From circumnavigating the world to the discovery of the solar system, from the beauty of Michelangelo’s David to the perfection of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, from the genius of Shakespeare to the daring of Luther and Erasmus, and via breathtaking advances in science and mathematics, man achieved new heights in this tumultuous period. 

The Renaissance changed the world. You might even say it created all of what we now know as modern life. 

THE BEGINNINGS OF OUR SCIENTIFIC AGE

The Discovery of Copernicus.

 The Polish astronomer Copernicus published a work in 1543 in which he refuted the old idea that the sun and all the stars revolved around the earth as a center, as was then taught in all the universities. He showed that, on the contrary, the sun was the center about which the earth and the rest of the planets revolved, and that the reason that the stars seem to go around the earth each day is because our globe revolves on its axis. Although Copernicus had been en- couraged to write his book by a cardinal and had dedicated it to the Pope, the Catholic as well as the Protestant theologians declared that the new theory contradicted the teachings of the Bible, and they therefore rejected it. But we know now that Copernicus was right and the theologians and universities wrong

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION  (THE NEW AGE OF MACHINERY).

A Revolution that changed the Life of Everyone. We have reviewed the startling changes and reforms introduced by the leaders of the French Revolution and by Napoleon Bonaparte, and the reconstruction of Europe at the Congress of Vienna. These were mainly the work of states- men, warriors, and diplomats. But a still more fundamental revolution than that which has been described had begun in England before the meeting of the Estates General. In studying the past we sometimes make the mistake of thinking that the great mass of the people were taking part in the various wars and congresses. We need only recollect, however, that even during the recent World War the everyday life of the great majority of people in the United States who did not participate directly or indirectly in the conflict went on much as usual. So it must have been in the past. While statesmen discussed the distribution of territories and thrones almost everyone went about his work almost unconscious of the changes that were taking place. Whether Polish territory went to Prussia or Russia, or a Bourbon king sat on the throne of France or not, the laborious life of the farmer and workman remained much the same. We shall now turn our attention to a revolution which did alter the life of everyone. This revolution was the work of scientific men and patient inventors who set about to improve man's ways of living. These men never stirred an assembly by their fiery denunciation of evils, or led an army to victory, or conducted a clever diplomatic negotiation. On the contrary, their attention was concentrated upon the homely operations of every- day life the housewife drawing out her thread with a distaff or spinning wheel, the slow work of the weaver at his primitive loom, the miner struggling against the water which threatened to flood his mine.

THE STEAM ENGINE

Demand for Iron, Steel, and Motive Power. The new inventions greatly increased the demand for iron and steel, for it was necessary to have a strong and durable material out of which machinery could be made. Moreover, some adequate power had to be found to run -the new machines. Windmills were common, and waterfalls and streams had long been used to turn water wheels, but the wind was uncertain and the streams were often low. By the invention of steam engines these difficulties could be overcome, and the mills need no longer, as formerly, be located near running water. The earliest engines were power pumps which raised water into a high reservoir so that it could fall with force on a water wheel. Pumps were also used to drain the water out of mines. While new methods of spinning and weaving were being introduced other inventors were finding better ways of melting and forging iron, and still others were improving the crude steam engines then in use. New processes for reducing iron from the ore were discovered. Coal began to be used instead of charcoal for softening the metal, and the old-fashioned bellows were replaced by great blast furnaces. Steam hammers were invented, weighing seven hundred and fifty pounds and striking three hundred blows a minute, to beat the iron into shape.

Light and Electricity.

During the nineteenth century the nature of heat and light was at last explained. Light and radiant heat are transmitted by minute waves produced, it is supposed by many scientists, in the ether, a something which it is assumed must everywhere exist, for without some medium the light would not reach us from the sun and stars. Electricity, of which very little was known in the eighteenth century, has now been promoted to the most important place in the physical universe. Light is believed to be nothing more than electric forces traveling through the ether from a source of electrical disturbance ; namely, the luminous body. Matter itself may ultimately be proved to be nothing more than electricity. The practical applications of electricity during the past thirty years are the most startling and best known of scientific achievements the telegraph, telephone, electric lights, and electric motors to run cars and various kinds of machines.

Importance of Recent History.

While our knowledge of the past now extends back far beyond what was known a hundred years ago, we have at the same time come to realize that the more recent the history the more important it is in enabling us to form a judgment on the problems of our own day. Twenty years ago such manuals as this were apt to deal pretty fully with ancient history Greece and Rome and give very little indeed about the modern world in which we live. This has now been reversed. The World War called everyone's attention to the vital importance of understanding European conditions if we were to understand the war and its consequences and the great problems that now face mankind. It will be noticed that less than half of the present volume is devoted to the whole period from earliest man down to the opening of the sixteenth century.

History alone enables us to understand the World of Today.

 The reason for this is that the authors believe that we can only understand the present by understanding the past. We each of us have to explain our own lives and circumstances by our own particular past, by our memories and experiences and the conditions in which we happen to have been placed. So it is with mankind in general. One has to realize man's slow struggle up from ignorance and savagery to understand the constant need for reform and the difficulty of carrying it out. There is no reason to think that we do not still have innumerable reforms to make, for our knowledge is ever increasing and our situation is constantly being changed as a result of new knowledge and new inventions, which have revolutionized the life of mankind in the past and will continue to change it in the future and so raise ever new tasks for the reformer.

Recommendations:

1.A General History of Europe:  From the origins of civilization to the present time, By James Harvey Robinson  And  James Henry Breasted.

2.Wikipedia.com

3. Microsoft Internet Archive.

This article is written by Khan Muhammad Zardari as an educational Assignment.