Essay On Ancient Greek Education

Women and Education in Ancient Greece

Throughout the history of Ancient Greece, education was limited to the upper class. Very little is known about the education of the lower classes due to an extremely low literacy rate among these groups. Greek boys, ages six to fourteen, were privately schooled by priests, teachers, and philosophers in reading, writing, art, mathematics, and philosophy. Women were, however, rarely schooled in these departments, unless they were educated within their home. A Greek woman’s occupation was the management of a household, which was taught to them by other females. They were segregated from the male citizens of Greece, working and living indoors and in an isolated “woman’s chamber”. In the Oeconomicus, written in the fourth century B.C., as a Socratic dialogue, Xenophon describes how Ischomachus, a typical Greek husband, conditioned his wife to be an acceptable manager of the house. Commonly, this type of training was the only form of “education” received by a young Greek woman.

“I would very much like you to tell me, Ischomachus, whether you yourself trained your wife to become the sort of woman that she ought to be, or whether she already knew how to carry out her duties when you took her as your …show more content…
Because there are few reports of women in education, and many accounts of a woman’s duties, we are able to understand their role in society. They were occasionally taught how to read and write within the privacy of the home, but usually only to train for household management and priestess duties like caring for religious documents. The women who were written about by Plutarch, Xenophon, and Plato were extreme violations of acceptable female behavior in ancient Greece. These writers obviously believed that they were unusual enough to mention in their