In some form or other, education has been around since the beginning of the human species.  This is because education, the process of facilitating learning, has always been a necessity.  After all, without education, no generation can be adequately fitted for the duties to perform in the world.  Each succeeding generation inherits the accumulated knowledge of the preceding one, generally becoming increasingly better.

For most people today, school and education are considered synonymously.  This is not surprising given that the experience most of us will have in schools is what is arguably the most important part of formal education.  For example, it is within the school setting that most of us learn to read, develop our skills in social interaction and encounter authority that does not come from a parent.

Indeed, schooling, as it exists today, and therefore education, only makes sense if we view it from a historical perspective.  Unlike other species, humans have always had the ability to organise, store and transmit knowledge in sounds and language.  Prior to technology, word of mouth communication was the only type of education that existed.  From the hunter-gatherer communities to the invention of agriculture, beginning 10,000 years ago, people depended on word of mouth communication to acquire vast knowledge of the plants, animals and land on which they depended.

Our understanding about the way schools first operated comes from ancient Greece, in about 4^th century BC.  In fact, the word ‘school’ comes from the Greek ‘schole’, which means leisure.  Back then, when schools were available only to the aristocracy, the assumption would have been that leisure was synonymous with learning.  Elsewhere in the ancient world, prominent examples of formal education were evident in the middle east, China and India, and their systems of education generally emphasised reading, writing and mathematics.  In these times, speech was the primary means by which people learned and passed on learning, making accurate memorisation a critical skill.

Education in ancient Greece stands out during this era though, because of its diversity.  It was the Greeks who first created what we would now call primary and secondary schools.  There was also a lot of emphasis from an early age on physical education, which was considered necessary for improving one’s appearance, preparation for war, and good health at an old age (Plutarch, 1927).  Roman schooling broadly followed the Greek model.  There were small schools for privileged boys, which taught grammar.  Then, the boys attended rhetoric schools, to prepare them for public life (Thomas, 2013).

The first examples of educational technology in the ancient world were the tools that students and teachers used for writing.  Over thousands of years and across the continents, various surfaces have been used as a medium for writing, including wax-covered writing boards (by the Romans), clay tablets (in the middle east), strips of bark from trees (in Indonesia, Tibet and the Americas), thick palm-like leaves (in South east Asia) and parchment, made of animal skin (common across the ancient world).