Lesson 2 223

• Preliterate people


  Faced the almost overwhelming problems of surviving in an environment that pitted them against drought and floods, wild animals, and attacks from hostile groups
• Preliterate people developed survival skills


  1. By trial and error

  2. Passed these on to their young

  3. Marked the passage from childhood to adulthood with ritual dancing, music, and dramatic acting

  4. Created a powerful supernatural meaning and evoked a moral response

  5. Children learned the group's prescriptions (acceptable behaviors) and proscriptions or taboos (forbidden behaviors)
• Enculturation


  Children learn the group's language and skills and assimilate its moral and religious values
• Oral tradition


  Storytelling to transmit cultural heritage
• Elders or priests, often gifted storytellers, sang or recited narratives of the group's past
• Combining myths and actual historical events, the oral tradition developed group identity by telling young people about the group's heroes, victories, and defeats
• Stories and storytelling remain an important and engaging educational strategy today, especially in preschools and primary grades
• Through stories, children meet their culture and its heroes, legends, and past
• Literacy


  The great cultural leap from expressing symbols in signs, pictographs, and letters and creating a written language
• Once writing was invented, children needed to be taught to read and write
• With writing and reading, it became possible to record the past and to create a history
• China was a great empire whose civilization reached high pinnacles of political, social, and educational development
• The Chinese educational heritage reveals persistent efforts to maintain unbroken cultural continuity
• The Chinese were ethnocentric and believed their language and culture to be superior to all others
• China's reluctance to adapt technology from other cultures isolated and weakened it and, by the nineteenth century, made it vulnerable to foreign exploitation
• Confucianism


  An educational philosophy that proposed a path for education during a period of social turmoil in China
• When the Han dynasty came to power in 207 BCE, Confucianism replaced Legalism as China's official philosophy
• Confucius


  Believed it was much more important to establish the conditions for an ethical society than to seek to answer unanswerable questions
• Confucian educational system


  Based on an ethical hierarchy of responsibilities that began with the emperor and flowed downward, touching everyone in society
• Confucian ideal of hierarchical relationships


  An ethical ladder on which the person standing on each rung is connected to the people standing above and below
• Confucian emphasis on civility

  Polite, correct, and proper behavior
• Confucian belief


  There was a proper way to behave on all occasions that governed all people in society and that no one should be excused from this propriety
• Confucian ethical or character education

  Learning how to perform the appropriate behaviors associated with the person's role and rank
• Confucian academy


  Educated students to be officials in the imperial government
• Confucian preservice education


  The period of training before students became government officials
• Confucian classroom management


  Held high expectations for students, maintained a proper distance but was approachable, corrected and criticized students in a positive and constructive way, mentoring was important
• Confucian core curriculum


  Studying selected great books such as the Classics of Change, of Documents, of Poetry, of Rites, and the Spring and Autumn Annals
• China's system of national examinations was an important educational legacy from ancient China
• The examinations emphasized recalling memorized information rather than solving actual problems
• The need to score high on the national examinations meant that teachers had to stay closely aligned with the Confucian texts and not allow for discussion that deviated from them
• The examination process, like the society, operated hierarchically and selectively
• In imperial days, only a few finalists were eligible for the empire's highest civil service positions
• The educational and examination systems were reserved exclusively for upper-class males
• Women, ineligible for government positions, were excluded from schools as well
• The concept of divine emperorship gave social, cultural, political, and educational stability to the Egyptian empire
• Knowledge and values were seen as reflecting an orderly, unchanging, and eternal cosmos
• The concept of a king-priest also gave the priestly elite high status and considerable power in Egyptian society
• The educational system reinforced this status and power by making the priestly elite guardians of the state culture
• Egypt required an educated bureaucracy to administer the empire and to collect taxes
• By 2700 BCE the Egyptians had established an extensive system of temple and court schools to train scribes, many of whom were priests, in reading and writing