Old Babylon School

We’re constantly hearing about how our students have changed, even more so in the wake of COVID-19. Not to mention there’s the constant drumbeat of pivoting away from non-traditional teaching approaches, as if there’s something bad about tradition. There’s a good reason tradition endures, and I think that lecturing has its usefulness, although it’s certainly not the only approach I employ from my pedagogical bag-of-tricks. If I’m feeling curmudgeonly about all this, I might refer to myself being old-school even as that term takes on increasingly negative connotations.

 

But my old-school isn’t all that old. I picked up useful tips observing my teachers, both what to try and what to avoid. It was one sign I knew that teaching was in the cards for me, because I found it interesting analyzing the varied teaching approaches I observed as a student. So if my teachers were old-school, I’ve retained parts of their pedagogy but infused it with what I bring to the table. I firmly believe that teachers should take advantage of their individual strengths and abilities, and so even if I admire a colleague’s teaching approach that’s very different from mine, I won’t necessarily emulate it.

 

As we go back in time, we know less and less about how school was conducted. There are caricatures aplenty of how old-school is out-of-date with modern technology, and we need to adapt or be deemed obsolete. How far can we go back? How old-school is the oldest schooling we’ve heard about? Turns out we know a little bit about school in Babylon. Not the Babylon of the Bible that sacked Jerusalem in 587 BCE, but older – what scholars today might call Old Babylon (circa 1900 to 1600 BCE). Why am I pondering this? Because I enjoy reading ancient history and archaeology and I’m working my way through Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization, by Paul Kriwaczek. 

 

Mesopotamia is fascinating. Thanks to the birth of cuneiform and a tradition of writing, we have a bunch of tablets from Old Babylon. But today’s post will just focus on what we know about schooling. Here are translated excerpts from a student who had just graduated:

 

“I had three days of vacation each month: and since each month has three holidays when one does not work, I therefore spent twenty-four days in school each month. And it did not seem like a very long time to me! From now on I will be able to devote myself to recopying and composing tablets, undertaking all useful mathematical operations. Indeed, I have a thorough knowledge of the art of writing: how to put the lines in place and to write… Since I have attended school the requisite amount of time [not stated how long] I am abreast of Sumerian, of spelling, of the contents of all tablets…”

 

The graduate goes on to claim the ability to draw up documents and contracts of various sorts: trade, marriage, sales, adoption. It’s like a resume on a tablet. Kriwaczek contrasts this with a translated satirical story titled ‘Schooldays’ where the writer bemoans the drudgery of school, the old-school teacher who beat him for constantly “breaking rules”, making errors, having poor handwriting, and more. Bribing the teacher for better treatment ensued.

 

There’s much we don’t know about school in Old Babylon, but the evidence accumulated at present suggests that temple officials (priests) ran private schools, but it wasn’t mainly a religious education but a secular one: reading, writing, and numeracy. Students were being trained to be scribes. And yes, math was challenging – additionally so because the Babylonians used base-sixty rather than base-ten, and they didn’t use the numeral zero nor decimal points. Apparently they used multiplication tables and the equivalent of the logarithm books that I used during my schooldays before hand calculators were allowed.

 

The science of Old Babylon school was also much more about going through many specific examples, and less about distilling abstract or general principles. This meant lots of memorization, and what are tablets of writing if not aids for memorizing and working your way through math problems that you can’t do in your head with limited working memory. Omens and portents were taken seriously, as was astrology. This shouldn’t surprise us – if you don’t know why something happens, you try to make connections (hypotheses) and see how they turn out. There was a lot of guesswork. Very similar to what many students do when they begin organic chemistry – memorization and guesswork. But once they see the underlying principles, then things might start to click.

 

Our human brains and capacity for learning haven’t changed very much evolutionarily in the last three thousand years. But our tools have! Perhaps that’s why there’s always a dance between old-school and new-tech, one that I expect to continue for generations to come.