The history of education is a part of the history of culture, in turn is a part of general, universal history. It is not easy to define what history is, because of it many interpretations have been given. For us, history is the study of human reality over time.
The history of education is limited to the division of the ages of man. In the beginnings of the Ancient Age it is necessary to place the conceptions and educational practices of the Indian, Chinese, Egyptian and Hebrew cultures. During the first millennium BC the different Greek paideias are developed (archaic, spartan, athenian and hellenistic). The Roman world assimilates Hellenism also in the educational field, especially thanks to Cicero who was the main promoter of the so-called Roman humanitas.
The end of the Roman Empire of the West marks the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the Middle Ages. The end of this age is set at the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (or in 1492, the discovery of America). Christianity, born and extended by the Roman Empire, assumes the task of maintaining the classical legacy, filtered, filtered by Christian doctrine.
From the full recovery of the knowledge of Greece and Rome that occurs during the Renaissance is born the new educational concept of Humanism throughout the sixteenth century, continued during the Baroque by pedagogical disciplinaryism and the illustrated colophon of the eighteenth century.
In contemporary education (XIX-XXI centuries) the current educational systems will be born, organized and controlled by the State.
On the other hand, education is such a fundamental component of culture, as science, art or literature can be. Without education, the acquisition and transmission of culture would not be possible because it lives and is in the spirit of the men. And this is also one of the essential functions of education to make culture continue to live through the centuries. A culture without education will be a dead culture.
Education is so widespread that it is not lacking in any society or at any time in history. In every society, however primitive, we find that man is educated.
The primitive peoples lacked teachers, schools and pedagogical doctrines, however, educated the man, enveloping him and pressing him with the totality of the actions and reactions of his rudimentary social life. In them, although no one had any idea of the educational effort that, spontaneously, society carried out at every moment, education existed as a fact. In any of the contemporary civilized societies we find educators, educational institutions and pedagogical theories; that is, we find a planned action, conscious, systematic.
The fundamental importance that the history of education has for any educator is that it allows knowledge of the educational past of humanity.
The educational fact is not presented by history as an isolated event, it is studied by linking it with the different philosophical, religious, social and political orientations that have influenced it. Seeing this, as a set of circumstances that have engendered it, allows us to appreciate to what extent education has been a factor in history and to what extent a culture is the determining force of an education.