School

History What it was

Rome had no public school system. Families who could afford it paid a teacher to educate their children, and many children, especially from poor families, received little or no schooling. Wealthy families sometimes hired a tutor at home instead.

History Stages of learning

• From about age seven, a primary teacher taught reading, writing and counting.
• Older pupils studied Latin and Greek literature with a teacher called a grammaticus.
• Some young men went on to a rhetor to learn public speaking, needed for law and politics.

History How lessons worked

Classes were often held in a rented shop or a covered space open to the street, sometimes just behind a curtain. Pupils wrote on wooden tablets coated with wax, using a pointed stylus; the flat end could smooth the wax to start again. Ink and papyrus were used for more permanent writing. Counting might be done on fingers, with pebbles or on a counting board.

In the 1st century AD, the teacher Quintilian wrote a long book on education. He argued that teachers should be patient, that pupils learn better when encouraged than when punished, and that learning should start early.

History Writing that survives

At Vindolanda, a Roman fort near Hadrian's Wall in Britain, archaeologists have found hundreds of thin wooden tablets written in ink. Two of them have lines from Virgil's famous poem, the Aeneid, copied out as writing practice, perhaps by children learning to write, just as pupils copy sentences today.

Think about it

1. Who was left out of Roman education, and why does that matter?
2. How is your school different from a Roman one?
3. Do you agree with Quintilian that encouragement works better than punishment?

Key words

Stylus

A pointed tool for writing on wax.

Grammaticus

A teacher of literature and language.

Rhetoric

The art of persuasive speaking.