School

The compulsory school system as we know today is a recent invention although the idea of setting up a school as a place for pursuing knowledge and an organization for teaching young children existed in ancient times in different parts of the world.http://library.thinkquest.org/J002606/AncientEgypt.html People in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome considered the ability to read and write important for various reasons. Egyptian school children learnt how to read and write in preparation of their future career.http://library.thinkquest.org/J002606/AncientEgypt.html For ancient Greeks, it was part of the training to be a wise and decent man.http://library.thinkquest.org/J002606/AncientEgypt.html Being influenced by the principals of Greek education, the Romans considered a man fully educated if he mastered Latin and received the same education as a native Greek.http://library.thinkquest.org/J002606/AncientEgypt.html But in Sparta, students could hardly read even after they finished school. They were raised and taught to be good soldiers.http://library.thinkquest.org/J002606/AncientEgypt.html

The Catholic Church was the next major provider of education and founder of schools in both the elementary branches and the department of higher studies. Many schools were attached to cathedrals and to monasteries for training priests and monks. Teaching was a way to protect Christians against the corrupt pagan standards of living in the Medieval Period. The monasteries and convents also educated both boys and girls not for the cloister but for the world in the so-called external schools. Parish schools slowly came into being and became a regular diocesan institution. Reading, writing, psalmody, Scripture, pastoral theology or a full program of Seven Liberal Arts (the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, the quadrivium of music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy) were taught.http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13554b.htm

Schools founded and owned by the governments, Protestant and Anglican churches or civil authorities began to appear in Germany, Austria, France, England and Ireland after the Reformation and Industrial Revolution.http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13554b.htm With the rise of nationalism in Europe, the school system was developed for training loyal citizens. King Frederick William I of Prussia inaugurated the first national compulsory school system in Europe in the 18th century. The trend spread to other European countries except for England where the tradition of voluntarism was at its strongest. Compulsion was finally introduced into English schools in 1870. Most of the American colonies followed the English tradition of voluntary parental education.http://mises.org/daily/2226#7 The first formal schools appeared in America in the 1630s. The Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted a compulsory literacy law for all children in 1642.http://mises.org/daily/2226#7 Massachusetts also became the first state to pass compulsory school attendance laws in 1852. By 1918, all states required children to go to schools.http://www.ncsl.org/default.aspx?tabid=12943