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 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 behavior


  The performance of rites or procedures that are done in the same way each time they are performed
• Confucius established an academy to educate students to be officials in the imperial government
• Confucian preservice education


  The period of training before students became government officials
• Confucian teacher-student relationships


  Well-known and followed with precision
• Confucian teacher was to guard and transmit the heritage to maintain cultural continuity and social stability
• Confucian core curriculum


  • Classics of Change
  • Classics of Documents
  • Classics of Poetry
  • Classics of Rites
  • Spring and Autumn Annals
• China's system of national examinations was an important educational legacy from ancient China
• The examination process, like the society, operated hierarchically and selectively
• The educational and examination systems were reserved exclusively for upper-class males
• 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 gave the priestly elite high status and considerable power in Egyptian society
• The educational system reinforced the status and power of the priestly elite by making them guardians of the state culture
• Egypt required an educated bureaucracy to administer the empire and to collect taxes
• Schools often were part of the temple complex, which furthered the close relationship between formal education and religion
• In the scribal schools, students learned to write the hieroglyphic script by copying documents on papyrus
• Advanced students studied mathematics, astronomy, religion, poetry, literature, medicine, and architecture
• All three religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are monotheistic in their belief in one God, a spiritual Creator of all existence, and in their emphasis on a sacred book, the Bible or the Koran, whose contents were revealed by God to prophets
• With their emphasis on reading and studying sacred scriptures, all three religions emphasized literacy, to read the book, and education, to learn its contents
• Hebraic or Judaic education


  An ongoing tradition for the Jewish people and an important reference point for Christians and Muslims
• Judaic education


  Aimed at inculcating the young with their cultural tradition through a carefully designed process of transmitting religious beliefs and rituals from one generation to the next
• Covenantal learning


  Learning was regarded as intrinsically valuable because it was about God's covenant with the Jewish people and was also an instrument for shaping behavior according to religiously sanctioned group norms