ANCIENT EGYPT EDUCATION

EGYPT ANCIENT EDUCATION

Try and imagine a society where education was only offered to a certain few. This was the reality of early Egypt, where only the sons of nobles and high class were offered the chance of an education, what were the choice of the middle class and peasants? They had to create a way of passing on their knowledge and experience to their children; they started home schooling their children.

Home school was more like apprenticeship, where the child at an early age starts to model their parent’s behaviors and learned different parts of their parent’s habits. As the child gets older the father passes small amounts of responsibilities and the older the child become the more responsibilities they are given. The purpose behind home schooling was very clear because a father passing on his knowledge to his son, since they were not able to afforded the chance to obtain a formal education. If your father for instance was a farmer, he would teach farming techniques such as the proper ways of planting certain vegetation, knowing the season for each type of plants, good and bad soil. If your father was a fisherman you were thought effective fishing techniques such as the types of baits to utilize, where and how far into the sea to go and find certain fish and also swimming and boating skills. These types of skill were never written down, but were passed down from generation to generation with slight modifications made because of the evaluation and advancements of tools and human knowledge.

The Mesopotamian educational structure was by far the more advanced system, because it went beyond reading and writing, also included such subjects a s law, science, astronomy, medicine and ethics. These subjects were vital to the preservation and survival of their culture. These students were suppose to read, remember and stand before the priest and repeat verbatim what he wrote without any mistakes, and mistakes were not allowed in the school.
We somehow adopted the Mesopotamian’s system of formal education, without having to stand and recite what we studied; we have substituted the reciting with paper exams which test our ability to retain the written texts.