Our ancient schoolroom isn’t copyrighted; we’re happy to share how to do it. And if you use any of our suggestions, we’d love to hear about it and maybe even see some pictures!

The following sections only explain how to do what we do, not how we know what to do; for the latter, see here.

An ancient schoolroom is an immersive experience designed to show participants what going to school was actually like in Roman times: participants discover the differences between ancient and modern schools not by being told what they are, but by experiencing them. But for people trying to create their own ancient schoolrooms, some key points can be spelled out:

• Ancient school behaviour was fundamentally different from ours. Pupils were taught mainly individually, and the typical format of an exercise was a period of independent work (singly or in a pair) followed by presenting the results to a teacher for immediate feedback. Multiple teachers worked together in the same room, staying in their chairs and expecting pupils to come up to them for feedback, help or guidance; raising a hand had no meaning. Even pupils’ arrival and departure were individual: there was no fixed start time and no timetable, so pupils came in one at a time, greeted the teacher on arrival, and then sat down and started working. (Also, though this is hard to replicate today, ancient schoolrooms typically contained pupils of widely differing ages and levels. They thus were not classrooms in the sense of containing a class or homogenous group of pupils, which is why we call them ‘schoolrooms’ rather than ‘classrooms’.)
• For a modern pupil, the real point of doing ancient-style exercises is not to successfully complete the task on which the exercise focusses, but to have the authentic ancient experience of trying to do that exercise. So it does not matter how well the pupils do on the exercises, only that they put in the same kind of mental effort and apply the same intellectual and practical skills as an ancient pupil, enabling them to experience what an ancient pupil experienced.
• The availability of physical props such as scenery and costumes considerably enhances the immersion into an alien world, as does the use of replica ancient writing materials. However, if the above two principles are observed pupils can gain some perception of how their own schooling differs from ancient education even in a modern physical environment with modern materials.

In order to make the immersion in antiquity work, participants need to be persuaded to act like Roman children: if they continue to do modern things like raising their hands to get the teacher’s attention, they will not get the ancient experience. One way to achieve this behaviour shift might be to talk to the pupils beforehand, explain what they will need to do, and ask them to do it. But in our experience, that does not work very well, because modern habits are very ingrained.

A more successful method, as well as more enjoyable, is to provide a replica ancient setting good enough to give participants the impression that they are no longer in the modern world; entering a different world shocks them out of their usual habits and makes it easy for them to act differently. That is the reason we use full Roman costumes and an ancient-style school space. Unfortunately, those parts of an ancient school are the hardest to provide (though we offer some tips here on costumes and here on space), but we think it is worth trying to provide them, because of the effect they have on other parts of the experience.

Replica ancient school materials are much easier to come by (see here). These materials are fun and interesting in themselves, and it is perfectly possible for children to learn a considerable amount by using them in a modern setting. There is nothing wrong with doing that, and we do it too on occasion. However, as experts in ancient education we urge you not to let your pupils think that ancient schools were like modern ones just using different technology. They weren’t, and the differences in how learning actually functioned are far more important and interesting than the differences in technology.

Therefore if you want to give pupils a real ancient school experience, the most important thing is to have a good set of ancient-style exercises (see here for those) and understand how to teach them in the way that an ancient teacher would have done. Most ancient teaching was individual and active rather than passive: teachers never spoke to the pupils as a group, but instead each child got a task, did it independently, and then once finished came up to the teacher to go over it.

Unfortunately, this essential component is very hard to replicate with a typical modern teacher-pupil ratio. We use one teacher for every five pupils; the ancients could do it with fewer teachers, but only because they could ask each pupil to work independently for several hours, which is hardly practical if your whole ancient schoolroom only lasts two hours and you want the children to experience multiple activities. (Also, it is hardly practical with modern children, who have not usually learned to concentrate independently for long periods.)

One solution is to get some helpers in for the session, so that you have enough teachers to use our five-to-one ratio. Another is to pair up the pupils to do authentically ancient two-person exercises such as dictation or reading a dialogue; that way they naturally recite in pairs and you only need one teacher for every ten pupils. (In a true emergency it is possible to put pupils in groups of three or four, but the quality of the experience seems to decline for each additional pupil: individual attention was an important part of the ancient experience, so one cannot replicate that experience without enough teachers to give a decent amount of individual attention.)

If you elect to have helpers you need to train them solidly, so that they can teach confidently and convincingly. This takes time, not only for them but also for you. For each of our full ancient schoolroom events we compose a teachers’ manual (see here for an example) explaining how to teach each exercise and ask potential teachers to learn the contents so that they can teach without looking at it. Then each gets an individual two-hour rehearsal in which I show them the replica materials and how to use these, and then we rehearse the entire event from pupil entry onwards, with me playing the pupil and making lots of mistakes.

Even experienced schoolteachers need this kind of training; in fact especially experienced teachers need it, because they know one way to teach and can find it difficult to switch to a new method. This is particularly the case since they can see that the new method is not particularly efficient for causing all their pupils to absorb particular information; an experienced teacher quite reasonably wants to do it better so that everyone will understand all the texts. But there isn’t actually any value to everyone understanding all the texts; the goal of an ancient school re-enactment is for pupils to understand the ancient school experience, and that only happens if the teaching is done the ancient way.

The rehearsals should take place not more than a week before the actual event, lest people forget things, but not immediately before it either, in case of failure. Because failure happens: sometimes potential teachers have not learned the material in the manual well enough to be doing it adequately by the end of a two-hour rehearsal. Some such people will be okay if asked to study some more and have another rehearsal tomorrow, but others will not and cannot act as teachers after all. As an example of the possible attrition rate, for one recent schoolroom event twenty-two people originally wanted to act as teachers. After reading the manual, considering scheduling conflicts, and finding out how much work was involved, fourteen got as far as a rehearsal. Of these nine passed at the first rehearsal, four passed at a subsequent rehearsal, and one was revealed at rehearsal to be unable to do the task and withdrew. That left us with thirteen of the original twenty-two, and I had spent at least two hours and in a few cases as many as five hours per teacher on rehearsals – but the results were terrific, which is what counts.

We normally have one arithmetic teacher, segregated into a corner, and the rest literature teachers, sitting in a row on chairs. If you are doing Latin exercises some of the literature teachers need to be able to teach Latin, but it is not necessary that they can all do that, provided you have enough non-Latin exercises and make sure that pupils rotate through the exercises in different orders so that the Latin teachers do not become overwhelmed and the non-Latin teachers always have something to do. (You can also have some people who only teach Latin, but they will have a hard time because pupils will constantly come to them for the other exercises as well.)

If you have enough spare capacity it is useful to have someone as a school slave. The slave makes sure everything is running smoothly; she wears a full costume so as to be able to go into the schoolroom freely, but as long as everything is going well she can stay outside, peering periodically through a gap in the door curtain to make sure that all is going well. Sitting outside she can head off random people who come along and might otherwise barge into the ancient space to find out what’s going on in there. And if someone does have a good reason to enter, such as a late-arriving pupil or a curious teacher with a free period, she can costume them up and brief them before letting them in. When there is a school slave the teachers should all have bells to ring in case of need; when one rings the slave pops in and sorts out whatever the problem is (spilled ink, all the wax tablets ending up with one teacher and unreachable by another, pupils who have stopped working and need to come recite, pupils leaning against the fake walls so that they could fall down, etc.). At Reading the slave role is normally taken by the Director, who doubles as an extra teacher when the queues get too long. But often one cannot afford the luxury of an extra person to play the slave, so teachers have to sort out problems themselves. (That is not completely authentic; ancient teachers stayed on their thrones and would not have cleaned up spilled ink themselves. But one does what one can.)

Ancient schools had no fixed start time; pupils arrived gradually and each one entered individually on arrival, greeted the teacher, and then started work. That individual entrance is important for jolting the pupils into actively being Roman: to get into the swing of things, they need to walk into another world and as their first act in it go up to the teacher and say hello. The way we achieve this is as follows.

When the pupils first arrive all the teachers except one are outside the ancient space to help with costuming (unless the pupils come in their own costumes); adult help is needed to select the right size tunics and shoes, and adult help is often needed to tie Roman shoelaces. If the pupils have not previously been briefed on what we’re doing, at that point we spend two or three minutes telling them, and then ask them to remove their coats/bags/shoes, stow them under the costume tables, and come to us for costumes. The costuming process naturally spaces out the pupils, so that some are dressed before others.

When some are almost ready, one teacher takes up a position at the entrance to the ancient space as doorkeeper. That person lets children in one by one (or in case of logjams in pairs), first checking that they are properly dressed (inspecting for plastic hairgrips, jeans showing below too-short tunics, wristwatches, loose shoelaces, etc.) and making sure they know how to greet the teacher on entrance (this can be ‘Hello, teacher!’ or salve, magister or χαῖρε, διδάσκαλε, depending on what is suitable). Pupils should be sent in only when there is a teacher inside free to attend to them, so as the number of pupils ready to enter increases the doorkeeper gradually asks colleagues to enter and become ancient teachers, until all the other teachers and all the pupils are in. Then the doorkeeper goes in to be the last teacher (or stays outside to be the slave).

The teachers who are inside when pupils enter need to prompt them to start with that ‘Hello, teacher!’ greeting, which is important for setting the tone precisely because it is so unnatural for us. Then they answer the greeting and give out the reading exercise, explaining what to do and why but not taking too long over that, since the doorkeeper cannot let more pupils in until a teacher is free to receive them. Once all pupils have entered and are working on the reading exercise there is normally a few minutes’ pause for the teachers before pupils start coming up to recite the reading; after that there may be no more breaks until the end of that session.

About ten minutes before the end of a session teachers stop giving out new exercises; instead pupils who finish a recitation are sent out to change back into modern schoolchildren. If you do not have a school slave, one of the teachers needs to come out to help with decostuming: children have a terrible tendency to rip the tunics and break the shoelaces at this point, so it’s worth insisting that they sit down and untie the shoelaces with their hands, and then slide the tunic off carefully. If all goes well the pupils all exit gradually, as they finish their exercises, and there is no abrupt end to the session: ancient pupils normally left one by one, as they had arrived.

What the teachers should do between the pupils’ entry and their departure is covered here, but we also provide here an example of one of our teachers’ manuals. Note that this is just one of many different permutations of what one can do…