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2700 BCE
Mesopotamia (abacus)
People in Mesopotamia used the first abacus all the way back in 2700 BCE -
Period: 2000 BCE to 1600 BCE
Mesopotamia
The alphabet of the Mesopotamia period, called the logographic system, took many years to learn. Meaning there were few educated people at this time. Only offspring of high status and high wealth men like royals and men with jobs as scribes, physicians, and temple administrators were schooled, excluding girls. Later, when a syllabic script became more widespread, more of the Mesopotamian population became literate. Women as well as men learned to read and write. -
Period: 1600 BCE to 1046 BCE
Shang dynasty (Ancient china)
normal people such as farmers and workers accepted rough education. In that time, aristocrats’ children studied in government schools. And normal people studied in private schools. Government schools were always built in cities and private schools were built in rural areas. Government schools paid attention on educating students about rituals, literature, politics, music, arts and archery. Private schools educated students to do farm work and handworks. -
Period: 1500 BCE to 601 BCE
Vedic period (Ancient India)
education from this period was based on the incantations of priests and Hindu texts and scriptures. The main aim of education, according to the Vedas, is liberation. While at first education was available to all, over time it became more ridged and selective as the social system dictated who could obtain education. -
Period: 1045 BCE to 256 BCE
Zhou Dynasty (Ancient China)
there were five national schools in the capital city, Pi Yong, an imperial school, and four other schools for the aristocrats and nobility, including Shang Xiang. The schools mainly taught the Six Arts: rites, music, archery, charioteering, calligraphy, and mathematics. According to the Book of Rites, at age twelve, boys learned arts related to rituals like music and dancing, and when older, archery and chariot driving. Girls learned ritual, correct deportment, silk production and weaving. -
Period: 685 BCE to 627 BCE
Mesopotamia (Ashurbanipal)
A king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, was proud of his scribal education. His youthful scholarly pursuits included oil divination, mathematics, reading and writing as well as the usual horsemanship, hunting, chariotry, soldierliness, craftsmanship, and royal decorum. During his reign he collected cuneiform texts from all over Mesopotamia, and especially Babylonia, in the library in Nineveh, the first systematically organized library in the ancient Middle East, which survives in part today. -
Period: 500 BCE to 400 BCE
Ancient Greece
The state played little part in schooling. Anyone could start a school. Parents could schooling for their child. Most parents, even the poor, sent their sons to schools for at least a few years. If they could afford it from around the age of seven until fourteen, learning gymnastics, music and literacy. Girls rarely received formal education. At writing school, the youngest students learned the alphabet by song, then later by copying the shapes of letters with a stylus on a waxed wooden tablet. -
450 BCE
Ancient Rome
The first schools in Ancient Rome arose around this period. These schools were concerned with the basic socialization and rudimentary education of young Roman children. The literacy rate in the 3rd century BC has been estimated as around one percent to two percent. There are very few primary sources or accounts of Roman educational process until the 2nd century BC, during which there was a proliferation of private schools in Rome. -
350 BCE
Ancient Grecce
Around this time, it was common for children at schools in Athens to study various arts. The richest students continued their education by studying with sophists, from whom they could learn subjects such as rhetoric, mathematics, geography, natural history, politics, and logic In the subsequent Roman empire, Greek was the primary language of science. Advanced scientific research and teaching was mainly carried on in the Hellenistic side of the Roman empire, in Greek. -
Period: 246 BCE to 207 BCE
Qin Dynasty (Ancient China)
during this period, a hierarchy of officials was set up to provide central control over the outlying areas of the empire. To enter this hierarchy, both literacy and knowledge of the increasing body of philosophy was required: “….the content of the educational process was designed not to engender functionally specific skills but rather to produce morally enlightened and cultivated generalists”. -
Period: 206 to 221
Han Dynasty (Ancient China)
boys were thought ready at age seven to start learning basic skills in reading, writing and calculation. In 124 BC, the Emperor Wudi established the Imperial Academy, the curriculum of which was the Five Classics of Confucius. By the end of the Han dynasty (220 AD) the academy enrolled more than 30,000 students, boys between the ages of fourteen and seventeen years. However education through this period was a luxury. -
Period: 500 to 1000
Early middle ages
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; evidence of these immediate forerunners of the later university at many places dates back to the early 6th century. -
Period: 500 to 700
Islam
During the 6th and 7th centuries, the Academy of Gundishapur, originally the intellectual center of the Sassanid Empire and subsequently a Muslim centre of learning, offered training in medicine, philosophy, theology and science. The faculty were versed not only in the Zoroastrian and Persian traditions, but in Greek and Indian learning as well. -
600
Ancient Japan
The history of education in Japan dates back at least to the 6th century, when Chinese learning was introduced at the Yamato court. Foreign civilizations have often provided new ideas for the development of Japan’s own culture.
Chinese teachings and ideas flowed into Japan from the sixth to the 9th century. Along with the introduction of Buddhism came the Chinese system of writing and its literary tradition, and Confucianism. -
900
The Islamic world
Bimaristan medical schools were formed in the medieval Islamic world, where medical diplomas were issued to students of Islamic medicine who were qualified to be a practicing Doctor of Medicine. Al-Azhar University, founded in Cairo, Egypt in 975, was an university which offered a variety of post-graduate degrees, had a Madrasah and theological seminary, and taught Islamic law, Islamic jurisprudence, Arabic grammar, Islamic astronomy, early Islamic philosophy and logic in Islamic philosophy. -
Period: 1040 to 1050
Ancient China
Prefectural schools had been neglected by the state and left to the devices of wealthy patrons who provided private finances. The chancellor of China issued an edict that used a combination of government funding and private financing to restore and rebuild all prefectural schools that had fallen into disuse and abandoned. Fan’s trend of government funding for education started the movement of public schools that eclipsed private academies, which wouldn't be reversed until the mid-13th century. -
Period: 1100 to 1200
Mid Middle ages
The first medieval institutions generally considered to be universities were established in Italy, France, and England in the late 11th and the 12th centuries for the study of arts, law, medicine, and theology. These universities evolved from much older Christian cathedral schools and monastic schools, and it is difficult to define the date on which they became true universities, although the lists of studia generalia for higher education in Europe held by the Vatican are a useful guide. -
1200
Mid middle ages (Robert of Melun)
Students in the twelfth-century were very proud of the master whom they studied under. They were not very concerned with telling others the place or region where they received their education. Those who studied under Robert of Melun were called the Meludinenses. These people did not study in Melun, but in Paris, and were given the group name of their master. Citizens in the twelfth-century became very interested in learning the rare and difficult skills masters could provide. -
Period: 1400 to
The Inca Empire
Inca education during the time of the Inca Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries was divided into two principal spheres: education for the upper classes and education for the general population. The royal classes and a few specially chosen individuals from the provinces of the Empire were formally educated by the Amautas, while the general population learned knowledge and skills from their immediate forebears. -
India
Indigenous education was widespread in India in the 18th century, with a school for every temple, mosque or village in most regions of the country. The subjects taught included Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Theology, Law, Astronomy, Metaphysics, Ethics, Medical Science and Religion. The schools were attended by students representative of all classes of society. -
Period: to
Europe (modern Era)
The modern era of French education begins in the 1790s. The Revolution in the 1790s abolished the traditional universities. Napoleon sought to replace them with new institutions, the Polytechnique, focused on technology. The elementary schools received little attention until 1830, when France copied the Prussian education system. -
Europe (Modern Era)
France passed the Guizot Law, this law mandated all local governments to establish primary schools for boys. It also established a common curriculum focused on moral and religious education, reading, and the system of weights and measurements. The expansion of education provision under the Guizot law was motivated by the July Monarchy’s desire to shape the moral character of future French citizens by promoting social order and political stability. -
Period: to
Austrailia
In Australia, compulsory education was enacted in the 1870s, and it was difficult to enforce. People found it hard to afford for school fees. Moreover, teachers felt that they did not get a high salary for what they did. -
Period: to
Europe, Jules Ferry (Modern Era)
Jules Ferry, an anti-clerical politician holding the office of Minister of Public Instruction in the 1880s, created the modern Republican school by requiring all children under the age of 15—boys and girls—to attend. see Jules Ferry laws Schools were free of charge and secular . The goal was to break the hold of the Catholic Church and monarchism on young people. Catholic schools were still tolerated but in the early 20th century the religious orders sponsoring them were shut down. -
Period: to
India (Lord Curzon)
Lord Curzon, the Viceroy 1899–1905, made mass education a high priority after finding that no more than 20% of India’s children attended school. His reforms centered on literacy training and on restructuring of the university systems. They stressed ungraded curricula, modern textbooks, and new examination systems. Curzon’s plans for technical education laid the foundations which were acted upon by later governments. -
Headphones and language labs
headphones started playing a vital role in the classroom in the 1950s. Language labs mashed up audio reels or cassette tapes with real, live instructors to help teach students around the world. -
Period: to
China (Modern Era)
In the 1950s, The Communist Party oversaw the rapid expansion of primary education throughout China. At the same time, it redesigned the primary school curriculum to emphasize the teaching of practical skills in an effort to improve the productivity of future workers. Paglayan notes that Chinese news sources during this time cited the eradication of illiteracy as necessary “to open the way for development of productivity and technical and cultural revolution." -
Period: to
South Vietnam (Modern Era)
there were two competing colonial powers in education, as the French continued their work and the Americans moved in. They sharply disagreed on goals. The French educators sought to preserving French culture among the Vietnamese elites and relied on the Mission Culturelle – the heir of the colonial Direction of Education – and its prestigious high schools. The Americans looked at the great mass of people and sought to make South Vietnam a nation strong enough to stop communism. -
Vocational Education Act of 1963 (U.S.)
The Vocational Education Act in 1963 funded technology use in schools. As a result, students learned programming languages like BASIC, and PCs gradually made their way into some classrooms. -
Handheld calculators
In the early 1970s, the first portable handheld calculators appeared, sporting low-powered chips and the itty-bitty LED displays still in use to this day. -
Scantrons
Tabulating machines and basic data processing are centuries old, but until Scantron’s machines started dispassionately judging student work in the early 1970s, teachers had to grade multiple-choice exams by hand. Scantron’s easy-to-use roboscoring sent the popularity of multiple-choice tests skyrocketing, and midterms were never the same again. -
Period: to
Seymour Papert
Mathematician and professor Seymour Papert first introduced microcomputers in the classroom by teaching basic programming in the early 1980s. His Logo program taught students basic programming skills. The idea was to create student-centered learning activities that required hands-on exploration. -
Period: to
Apple computers
By the mid-1980s, Apple computers had also gained a foothold in classrooms, and a more common approach to technology integration gained popularity. Teachers used edtech software solutions: Drilling students with electronic programs. Teachers routinely assigned students to computer tasks, where learners answered an endless series of questions based on knowledge and recall. -
The Interweb
The early Internet was the exclusive stomping ground of the government and cutting-edge universities, and classroom use of the Web didn’t flourish until the National Science Foundation lifted the ban on commercial Web use in the early ’90s. In 1994, a mere 3 percent of classrooms were Net-connected. By 2001, that number had skyrocketed to 87 percent -
Period: to
STEM
That connectedness revolutionized not only business and interpersonal relationships but also education. Beginning in the early 2000s, there was a greater emphasis on a new form of education: STEM, short for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. -
Period: to
Africa (2000s)
Africa has more than 40 million children. According to UNESCO’s Regional overview on sub-Saharan Africa, in 2000 only 58% of children were enrolled in primary schools, the lowest enrollment rate of any region. The USAID Center reports as of 2005, forty percent of school-aged children in Africa do not attend primary school. -
Education index
This is a graph that shows the education index of the world between 2007 and 2008