European education has been marked throughout its many centuries by engagement with Greek and Roman culture. Greek and Latin language and literature have dominated higher-education syllabuses - in some times and places to the exclusion of nearly all else: Aristotelian logic and the ancient trivium and quadrivium in the medieval curriculum (Cobban 1975; 1999; Knowles 1988); revived attention to classical literature in Italian Renaissance humanism, with its focus on rhetorical style and moral education (Grendler 1989); and the central (but always disputed) place of classical learning within the universities and elite society of nineteenth - and twentieth-century Europe (Stray 1998). Moreover, many educational theorists have invoked in general terms the ideals of ancient Greek learning as models for their own cultures, usually with some acknowledgement about how those ideals must be adapted (e. g. Castle 1961; Nussbaum 1997); and many of the key principles of the European educational tradition are themselves derived from the ancient world, for example commitment to particular visions of how the sum of human knowledge ought to be divided (see O. Pedersen 1997 on conceptual continuities between classical and medieval education). However, it is also striking that we rarely see in modern writing on education any more concrete ideal of close adherence to ancient institutions and techniques of learning. In that sense, ancient education is both a close ancestor and at the same time a very unfamiliar counterpart to our own - although that has not stopped modern scholarship from imposing the language of modern educational institutions on their ancient equivalents, in ways which sometimes mean that their distance from us is lost to view.
World History
