What do children do at school in medievil times?

Answer 1

There weren't schools in that time frame. The vast majority of people were illiterate. Only the nobles were educated and most of that was done by tutors.

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Sorry to differ, but there were schools in the Middle Ages. In fact there were lots of them. There are related links below on this.

What children did at school depended on the school. In the Byzantine Empire, there was a system of primary education that was state operated at the village level. It operated during the entire Middle Ages, as it had opened in 425 AD and only closed down when the Byzantine Empire fell, in 1453. It taught children reading, writing, and arithmetic, with a view to seeing to it that as many soldiers as possible were educated. I have been told that girls were also educated in at least some of these.

Most, but not all, western schools were run by the Church, typically at cathedrals or monasteries. These usually taught children in Latin, and were intended to teach children who would eventually be clergy, scholars, and lawyers. Some of these schools may have only taught reading and writing, but such people as manorial stewards needed education, and so mathematics was probably taught in most. Some members of royal families attended such schools, one known example being Matilda of Scotland, who was the queen of King Henry I of England.

Some in the West were state operated. An example Beverley Grammar School, in Yorkshire, was opened in 700 AD as a state run school, and continues to this day. We probably have no record of what was taught there originally, but the educational reforms of King Alfred the Great fostered schools that taught in English (Anglo-Saxon) and included translations of literary texts of ancient times. Children in these schools learned the basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. But they learned more, as well. The intent of this educational system was to educate all freemen and members of the nobility. King Alfred had his own daughters educated, and we might guess that other girls were taught as well.

In the 13th century, Arabic numerals were introduced to Europe, and this brought about a change in education intended to fill the needs of people who would use the new mathematics. This brought about a set of schools called Abacus Schools, which taught business skills to the children of merchants. Since women of this class were often required to tend business when their husbands were sick or away, as often happened, abacus schools were coeducational. They taught reading and writing in vernacular languages, in addition to mathematics. Their education included some rather basic business math, including such things as interest calculations.

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