Welcome to our website dedicated to the Reading Ancient Schoolroom, a window to the fascinating world of ancient education!

This is a project to enable modern students to find out first-hand what the ancient world was really like by attending a re-created ancient school. Based on Reading academics’ meticulous research (see here) into schooling in the ancient world, the Reading ancient schoolroom takes place in a replica of an ancient school, in which all participants wear Roman costumes (for our costumes see here) and use replica ancient writing materials including wax tablets, styluses, reed pens, inkwells, ostraca, and papyrus (for more about the equipment see here). Students practise the type of exercises that were commonly done in ancient schools, normally in English, though Latin and Greek are also available on request (for the full list of activities see here), and do so in a setting that uses the ancient rather than modern educational conventions. These conventions include entering the schoolroom one by one and greeting the teacher, no lecturing from the teacher, and students working individually at their own pace. Students normally love the ancient schoolroom; for their comments, see here.

The ancient schoolroom is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, which allows us to travel to schools.

We offer visits both for primary and secondary schools and most of our activities are available (appropriately adjusted) for all ages and abilities. The schoolroom can support study of the Romans, Greeks, and/or Egyptians; it comes in two versions, either set in Graeco-Roman Egypt or set in Roman Britain. Would you like us to visit your school? If so, please let us know (contact information here)! You can find out more about the activities available here, and information about how they can work with your curriculum here for secondary schools or here for primary schools. We have to charge for visits to cover our costs, with the price depending on how large a team we need to bring, how much equipment is needed, and how far we have to travel; for specifics see here.

You can watch a short (8-minute) film about the schoolroom here: https://youtu.be/gjelkRKnJOQ. The film was made by Motion Blurr films (thank you Motion Blurr!), commissioned by the University of Reading (thank you Reading!), and features students from Dolphin School (thank you Dolphin!!!). A 1-minute clip is also available here: https://youtu.be/AdH6d63Y9zE. For more pictures of the schoolroom in action, see here.

The schoolroom was founded in 2014 (for our history see here) by University of Reading Professor Eleanor Dickey FBA, who is still its Director. Since 2017 she has been supported by University of Reading Classics Research Fellow Nadin Marsovszki, who is now the Associate Director.

The Schoolroom became a charity on 14 August 2023, with the registered charity number 1204349. The trustees of the charity are University of Reading Professors of Classics Eleanor Dickey, Emma Aston, and Christa Gray, as well as Charles Stewart, who holds an MA in Classics and Ancient History from the University of Reading, Daniela Colomo, Professor of Papyrology at the University of Naples, and Dr. Marigold Norbye, Lecturer at University College London.

Events are staffed by a team normally consisting of Eleanor, Nadin, and some of the other individuals profiled here. If you would like to join our team, see here.