Where did boys and girls attend school in Jesus' time?

Answer 1

A:Literacy was not needed in traditional societies in the first century and few children had any sort of schooling at all. Historians have established that most peasants and village artisans were so grindingly poor that real hunger was an ever-present problem, and most children were expected to work, not study.

Rabbinic sources support evidence that the literacy rate in Palestine at this time was less than 3 per cent, which demonstrates that education was limited to the children of those who could afford such a luxury. John Dominic Crossan (The Birth of Christianity) notes that Jesus was a peasant from a peasant village and therefore, for Crossan, Jesus was illiterate until the opposite is proven. He says it is not proven but simply presumed by Luke, when he has Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth in 4:16-20.

The Apostle Paul was a Jew who had learnt to write and no doubt he was taught by a scribe, possibly in a Jewish religious school. Acts of the Apostles says that he was actually taught by the famed Gamaliel in Jerusalem, but scholars doubt that Paul really spent time in Jerusalem during the lifetime of Jesus.