Richard Carrier: Science Education in the Early Roman Empire
Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2016 2:27 am
He has published a book, " Science Education in the Early Roman Empire", that is an expansion of part of his PhD thesis. The rest of it he is still working on, and it should come out as "The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire".
He discusses ancient Roman education with an emphasis on science-related subjects.
It was mostly members of the elite and their children who got educated, because education could get expensive, and not many people had the time and money to get very educated. A few slaves did get some education, however, because literacy was a useful skill.
Primary education was mostly in the three R's: reading, writing, and arithmetic, and secondary education, until the mid teens, continued it, with emphasis on the literary classes and writing in a good literary style. Higher or tertiary education was usually in rhetoric: speechmaking and debating -- making speeches was a fine art in that society. Advanced or quaternary education was often professional: medicine or engineering or law.
A good preparation for higher education was taking the enkyklios paideia courses (roughly "well-rounded learning"). The lower three, later named the trivium ("three ways"), were grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, while the upper four, later named the quadrivium ("four ways"), were arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Arithmetic included what is now algebra, geometry what is now trigonometry, astronomy what is now timekeeping and calendars, and music acoustic theory. Not a lot of people completed it, though many educated people had at least some acquaintance with it.
There was a curious difficulty: a lot of the scientific literature, or at least what qualified as science back then, was in Greek, without good Latin translations, because some Latin literati disliked neologisms. But many educated Romans learned Greek for other reasons, and that would have helped them there. How did science come to speak only English? | Aeon Essays chronicles the history of languages for describing scientific research. First Greek, then Latin, then Latin and vernacular languages, then English, French, and German, and then finally English.
He discusses ancient Roman education with an emphasis on science-related subjects.
Even if it had been called "natural philosophy" until the late 19th cy.And by “science” in this context I mean knowledge of the natural world, actively pursued by empirical means, with an ongoing concern for developing and employing valid methods of drawing conclusions from observations.
It was mostly members of the elite and their children who got educated, because education could get expensive, and not many people had the time and money to get very educated. A few slaves did get some education, however, because literacy was a useful skill.
Primary education was mostly in the three R's: reading, writing, and arithmetic, and secondary education, until the mid teens, continued it, with emphasis on the literary classes and writing in a good literary style. Higher or tertiary education was usually in rhetoric: speechmaking and debating -- making speeches was a fine art in that society. Advanced or quaternary education was often professional: medicine or engineering or law.
A good preparation for higher education was taking the enkyklios paideia courses (roughly "well-rounded learning"). The lower three, later named the trivium ("three ways"), were grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, while the upper four, later named the quadrivium ("four ways"), were arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Arithmetic included what is now algebra, geometry what is now trigonometry, astronomy what is now timekeeping and calendars, and music acoustic theory. Not a lot of people completed it, though many educated people had at least some acquaintance with it.
There was a curious difficulty: a lot of the scientific literature, or at least what qualified as science back then, was in Greek, without good Latin translations, because some Latin literati disliked neologisms. But many educated Romans learned Greek for other reasons, and that would have helped them there. How did science come to speak only English? | Aeon Essays chronicles the history of languages for describing scientific research. First Greek, then Latin, then Latin and vernacular languages, then English, French, and German, and then finally English.