History of Education

The systematic provision of learning techniques to most children, such as literacy, has been a development of the last 150 or 200 years, or even last 50 years in some countries. Schools for the young have historically been supplemented with advanced training for priests, bureaucrats and specialists.

Starting in about 3500 B.C., various writing systems developed in ancient civilizations around the world. In Egypt fully developed hieroglyphs were in use at Abydos as early as 3400 B.C.oldest known alphabet was developed in central Egypt around 2000 B.C. from a hieroglyphic prototype. One hieroglyphic script was used on stone monuments, other cursive scripts were used for writing in ink on papyrus, a flexible, paper-like material, made from the stems of reeds that grow in marshes and beside rivers such as the River Nile.

The Phoenician writing system was adapted from the Proto-Canaanite script in around the 11th century BC, which in turn borrowed ideas from Egyptian hieroglyphics. This script was adapted by the Greeks. A variant of the early Greek alphabet gave rise to the Etruscan alphabet, and its own descendants, such as the Latin alphabet. Other descendants from the Greek alphabet include the Cyrillic script, used to write Russian, among others.

The Phoenician system was also adapted into the Aramaic script, from which the Hebrew script and also that of Arabic are descended.

In China, the early oracle bone script has survived on tens of thousands of oracle bones dating from around 1400-1200 B.C. in the Shang Dynasty. Out of more than 2500 written characters in use in China in about 1200 BC, as many as 1400 are identifiable as the source of later standard Chinese characters.

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