Cognitive development in the classroom: Reading, writing and arithmetic

One of the most obvious places to study cognitive development is the classroom. It’s been estimated that children will spend 15,000 hours in class before the age of 16. In the nineteenth century a high master of the famous London school St Paul’s wrote to parents to say that the only subjects taught at the school were Greek and Latin. Children had three half-days off a week. Parents were quite free to use the time to engage tutors to teach their offspring other subjects but, as far as the school was concerned, all one needed for a proper education was the classics.