 Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today, along with a bunch of other YouTubers in the WeCreateEDU group, we're exploring education. The word education comes from Latin X meaning out of and Dukara meaning to lead, so literally to lead out of. Latin edukare had the root sense of to bring up or rear a child, literally leading them out of childhood. Since the main job of childrearing is education, I suppose, the word gained its more specific sense. But thinking about this etymology helps us to understand education and its history in a number of ways, because it can be said that the history of education is the history of civilization. One of the purposes of education is to perpetuate and extend a culture's values and knowledge into the future. So therefore the content of education is culturally specific. Education reflects societal values, and so we can think of education as a kind of leading or directing in more ways than one. And we can see similar notions in other words to do with education, such as the Germanic-derived word learn. It comes from the Proto-Indo-European root lace, meaning track or furrow. So the underlying sense here is to gain experience by following a track. Closely related is the word lore, something that is learned. And similarly, the word curriculum, closely related to the word course, literally means a running, coming from the Proto-Indo-European root cares, meaning run. So let's follow the track or course of history of education in the Western world and see where it leads us. Formal education, based around the written word, really begins in the Western world with ancient Greece after the introduction of the alphabet. And when we're talking about education in ancient Greece, due to the nature of our sources, we're really talking about the city of Athens in the 5th to 4th centuries, where students from citizen families could receive a basic, relatively low-cost education preparing them for citizenship, oratory, and ethics. So it's no coincidence that the birthplace of Western democracy valued civic responsibility so highly that their educational system was largely geared towards preparing young elite men for public life and taking part in the democratic process. However, it should be stressed that this was not state-funded education, but paid for through tuition fees to private tutors, so not everyone could afford it. And it was intended for only those who were allowed to participate in the democracy, Athenian citizen men, not slaves, foreigners, or women. Only Sparta had a publicly funded education, and it was primarily in the martial arts, not academics. In Athens, physical education, academics, and arts were covered in different schools. Paidotribes, from pice, meaning child, since the whole point of education was transforming young boys into men, covered gymnastics and general physical education. The Qitharis days, named after the Qithara, or liar, covered music and lyric poetry. And the Grammatis days, unsurprisingly, taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as literature. And accompanying these young boys to school as attendant and guard was a slave known as Paidogogos, meaning literally child-leading. From this we get the words pedagogue and pedagogy, even though originally that slave didn't actually teach the boy he attended. We also get the word encyclopedia from this child root. The phrase encyclios paideia referred to a general education, literally meaning circle of child rearing. And from this general education idea it was eventually turned into a word for a book of general knowledge. But getting back to the Greek education in Athens, after the basic course of schooling, students then had the option to go on to higher education, either in a practical art, such as medicine or architecture, or in philosophy. And this is where the famous teachers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle come into the picture, as they each founded their own school. These were really just groups of students who met in some often outdoor location to listen to the teachings of their masters. Plato's students happened to meet in a grove honoring the Athenian hero Akademos, and so his school came to be known as the academia, and that's where we get the word academic from. Moving from Greece to Rome, we can see a strong continuity in educational practices with an emphasis on rhetoric and oratory important to Roman public life in their republican system. Though physical education and music dropped out of the main curriculum. And it's from this period that we get the beginnings of the notion of a liberal arts education, because in Latin, liberalis meant free, so a liberal education was an education fit for freeborn people, not slaves. Though in practice, it was much more available to the higher classes. And of course, education is still a classist institution today, though we often pretend it isn't. With the better schools in the richer neighborhoods and university tuition fees restricting higher education to those who can afford to pay for it and different types of universities open to people with more money. And this is a notion that's also expressed in the word school itself, which comes from Greek, skole, meaning leisure. It wasn't that school itself was leisurely, but that to be able to go to school, one had to have the leisure time away from working, the leisure class as it were. The Romans had a similar notion in their word for school, ludus, a word which could also mean play, game, diversion. And that leisure was possible in large part because both Athens and Rome were slave-owning societies, so the leisure to go to school was dependent on a large and very unlesured class. Later on, in the Middle Ages in England, we find the distinction between the learned and the lay, or lud, both lay and lud, ultimately from Latin laicus, from Greek laicus, of the people, from Laos, referring to the common people. In the Middle Ages, education was mostly to be found in the church, hence the learned-lay distinction. And if you weren't educated, you were lud, a word which in later times gained a distinctly pejorative sense. One of the major differences between Roman and Greek education was that girls often received some education in Rome. Roman education was divided into three levels. The teacher of the first level was called the Ludii Magister, literally schoolmaster, and taught the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic to boys and girls from about seven to eleven years of age. After that, students aged 12 to 15 would be taught grammar and literature by a grammaticus, and then boys over 16 could move on to the rector to learn rhetoric. Girls wouldn't go on to that level though, since they'd have no opportunity for public speaking. Many, if not most of those teachers, would have themselves been slaves or ex-slaves, so again, the leisure that allowed the students time to learn the liberal arts was a direct result of labor by slaves. Given this history, it's not surprising that much of our educational vocabulary comes from Greek and Latin, but we also get some from Germanic sources, such as the word teach, which comes from old English tachan, ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root daik, which means to show, and is closely related to the word token, etymologically something that shows. Also from this root comes the word dictionary, the Latin word dictionarius being coined in the 13th century by an Englishman, John of Garland, who taught in Paris and wanted to create a resource to help his students learn Latin vocabulary. In any case, this shows something about how teaching often works. The teacher shows the students. For the students, of course, this can mean a lot of work, and that's etymologically appropriate, because student comes from Latin studere, meaning to be eager, take pains, strive after, thus implying great effort, and is ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European root sto, meaning to hit. Appropriate, perhaps, to how often ancient teachers beat their students if they didn't apply themselves to their studies, also from Latin studeo, with adequate eagerness. Of course, teachers shouldn't only be thought of as strict taskmasters. They also care for their students, as the word tutor implies, coming from Latin tueri, meaning to protect. The educational sense of the word was a much later development. Pupil, another word for student, is the diminutive form of pupus boy and pupa girl in Latin. There's a flavor of small cuteness in this root, which also gives us puppy and puppet, and Latin pupilla could also be used to mean doll, from which, believe it or not, we get pupil in the sense of the dark aperture in the eye, because if you look in someone's eye, you can sometimes see a little doll-like version of yourself reflected. In Latin, the main word for student was discipulus, from which we get disciple, as in the students and followers of Jesus. This word comes from the Latin discora, meaning to learn, ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root dec, meaning to take or accept. And interestingly, this root also leads to the Latin word docere, meaning to teach, which gives English the word doctor, the highest class of teacher, I suppose. So now that we've got the students and the teacher, we've got the whole classroom ready. But where does the word class come from? Well, it's etymologically an interesting one, coming from Latin classes, which originally referred to the Roman people under arms, in other words, the army or fleet. The underlying sense is a call to arms, as the word comes from a Proto-Indo-European root, meaning to shout. The word eventually broadened in sense to refer to classes or groups of people, and then groups of anything. In English, it came to refer to a group of students around 1600, but we also have the older sense of the word in such expressions as social class. It also came to refer specifically to the highest class of something, hence classical, as in classical music, supposedly the highest genre of music, originally used to distinguish the music of Mozart and his contemporaries from the later music of the Romantic period, and later still to make a distinction between the older music and the music of the 20th century and beyond. In literary circles, we similarly refer to classic literature, implying it's better than all this modern stuff. But this also points us towards the importance of the classical world, that is, classical Greece and Rome, to our story of education. When ancient culture was rediscovered during the Renaissance, it was referred to as classical, implying that it was better than the medieval period that it followed. And when it was all readopted and copied, we refer to that period in the 18th century as neoclassical. And so that's what we refer to as a classical education now, an education in the culture of the classical world, not necessarily an education like students received in ancient times, though it was something of a return to the Greek model downplaying all the theological education of the medieval world. So the education of the early modern period involved classical languages like Latin and Greek as well as the natural sciences. So what about education in that medieval period? Well, the main educator at that time was the church. Students could attend a monastic or cathedral school in order to become a member of the clergy or to become a scribe. As the values of society shifted, so too did the emphasis of that education. Whereas Greek and Roman educations emphasized public life and citizenship, the medieval education was all about preparing not for this life, but for the next life after death. Physical exercise was out and textual study was definitely in. Students were taught reading and writing in Latin, not their own native language, and they would spend their time copying church writings. However, the basic subjects still came out of the ancient period in the form of the seven liberal arts, first codified in the 5th century by Martianus Capella, growing out of that Encuclio's Pidea circle of education of the Greek world. The seven liberal arts were made up of the Trivium, Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic, and the Quadrivium, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy. We still today talk about a liberal arts education or liberal arts college. In fact, our highest level of education today, the university comes to us from the Middle Ages and the origin and etymology of the university reveals a certain irony about the state of education in our society. Part of the impetus for these new institutions of higher learning was the high demand for education outside of the cathedral schools that increasingly were unable to keep up with demand. So groups of students and teachers began to spontaneously congregate in large cities such as Bologna in Italy, Paris in France and Oxford in England. But there were a number of problems with these growing schools. Unscrupulous school masters could cheat students by taking their money and running or by pretending to have mastery of subjects they didn't really know. And as students gathered in the towns, unscrupulous locals saw their chance to raise the costs of rooms and food sky high. So the students began to band together, the first student unions if you will. Similarly, the teachers themselves were concerned with maintaining the standards of education and wanted to regulate their profession in the manner of the other medieval trade guilds, the forerunner of the trade union. You might have thought that the word university reflects the idea of universal education or the universal coverage of subjects, but it's short for Universitas Magistorum at Scolarium, the Scholastic Guilds or Corporations of Students and Masters. They were self-regulating and wanted to protect their own interests against outside forces. There's an irony of the origin of universities and collectives that were trying to reduce the financial barriers to education and protect the livelihood of the teachers given the growing corporatization of universities today, the rising cost of tuition, and the reduction in wages and job security for university teachers. There's a growing need, therefore, for new ways to make learning at all levels more accessible, picking up on those ancient ideals of education as essential to every citizen, but without those ancient restrictions on who counts as a citizen. One important way this is happening is with things like this very video. Educational YouTubers bringing their knowledge and enthusiasm to as many people as possible for free. And I just want to say how glad I am to be able to participate in this really important project of making education a more accessible and participatory process. So thank you for supporting me, and thanks to the great YouTube educators of the WeCreateEDU community. You can see many examples of their amazing creative entertaining and educational videos in the playlist linked at the end of this video. About why textbooks are so expensive, the history of teaching music theory, the learning benefits of dirt, and much more. Thanks for watching. If you've enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections, please subscribe to this channel or share it. And check out our Patreon, where you can make a contribution to help me make more videos. I'm at alliterative on Twitter, and you can read more of my thoughts on my blog at alliterative.net.