Trends in Education

In the ancient times, the Eastern society was the main leader in education. The history shows that civilization grew first in the eastern society of the world. At that time, the Indus-valley civilization and the Mohen-jo-daro civilization were the society, and this civilization was only possible through the knowledge gained with education.

Whereas, in the Western part, Greece was the leader where it was searching for knowledge or wisdom and developing affection among people and spreading it through learning and lectures. Greece’s philosophers namely Socrates born in 469 BC, his disciple Plato born in 428 BC and Aristotle, born in 384 BC were the great philosophers at their time and they did influence the eastern society, mainly in Europe.

The sophist, the lecturers or teachers of Greece used to travel from one city to another in the late fifth century to teach for a fee. They used to teach various topics and subjects and their main aim was to provide training in oratory, the tips and techniques to win over opinions in the court and assemblies. Sophism was not a doctrine, but was a social movement aroused due to the rise of democracy.

At that time, education was not seen so important as today. Nations or states did not take any responsibilities of education like today. Knowledge used to spread depending upon the individual or group efforts. Hence, we can see that education in the western society was not institutionalized and was informal in nature to begin with. In the West, it took ages for education to take a formal shape or mode.

 In the early age, in the East education was very informal. The home used to be the school for the child. Even today home is considered or viewed as the first school as they learn to speak, crawl, walk and learns behavior of others. Parents used to be the teachers who used to have dialogues with their children about how to live and what to do for living. The basic teaching used to be person’s roles, responsibilities and duties towards self, family, society and nation. Children were told about truth, moral, respect, tolerance, sacrifice and spiritualism so that they can live a good and respectable life.