Contemporary educational systems are certainly not the best in the history of mankind, but rather stand as an ideal degraded -- torn down from what it was or could have been. There is no incentive to make the teachers or the students perform so our schools are full of fancy teaching techniques that don’t teach, political correctness the avoids reality, and poor performance by teachers and students. Universities, for their part, are more interested in collecting money than applying educational rigor. What other reason is there to explain how the four year degree has become a six year degree and the bell shaped curve of grades has been compressed into A-C.
But let us not rail against current problems. Instead, we’ll go back in time to see what we can learn. In Greece we start with Homer because he is the first model for the education of Greeks after the Dark Ages.