Abstract
School documentation : its biases and limitations (2)
The biggest hurdle facing anyone wishing to work on schooling from papyri is whether or not they are dealing with a school text. This brings us to a review of the criteria for belonging to the corpus of school papyri. And despite the help these clues provide, the risks of misinterpretation are not absent.
The volatility of school facts
Beyond texts, schooling is volatile, fluctuating and often eludes analysis that seeks to grasp it too rigidly.
Archaeology, for example, is almost totally helpless when it comes to schools. With the exception of the one discovered in 2006 at Amheida (Dakhla oasis), we have virtually no archaeologically certain schools. But should we be surprised by the paucity of archaeological evidence ? Schooling was usually carried out in a setting not specifically devoted to teaching (the teacher's home, monasteries, etc.). As for iconographic evidence, all of which is extra-Egyptian, it is extremely rare and somewhat at odds with the realia that school historians would be tempted to seek out.
A uniform, homogeneous curriculum ?
The volatility of schooling is also evident in the organization of the curriculum, which is anything but fixed and homogeneous. Literary sources certainly agree on the existence of three levels : (1) the elementary level, where children learn to read and write (notably from short excerpts of works), as well as arithmetic, under the guidance of the grammatistês ; (2) the intermediate level, or grammatikê " grammar ", where pupils acquire the basics of the language (morphology, syntax) through classical authors, as well as notions of rhetoric (through preparatory exercises), history and science, under the guidance of the grammatikos ; (3) the higher level, or rhêtorikê, where the student learns rhetoric first and foremost, and often philosophy as well, in the company of the sophist or rhetorician.
In practice, this framework is anything but uniform. The situation could vary greatly from place to place and from environment to environment. We are often dealing with a system that did not develop uniformly for all in successive stages, but rather in two parallel curricula depending on the social milieu : elementary school was often the only stage through which slaves and middle-class freemen passed, while higher-level schools welcomed children from the upper classes, who had received their elementary training at home under the guidance of a tutor, or found in these same schools a place to receive it alongside older pupils.
This blurring of levels is well illustrated by the colloquia of the Hermeneumata (practical manuals that enabled subjects of the Empire to get by in Latin if they were Greek-speaking, or in Greek if they were Latin-speaking) : they show pupils from several levels working in the same room under the guidance of a master and an assistant, as well as more advanced pupils doing " tutoring ".
But the tripartite curriculum remains a pedagogical ideal. That's why I've decided to follow its stages, through three files from the5th and especially 6th centuries, in other words, post-Christianity.
