To Thyself Be True — The Truth About Grammar Schools

Once upon a time in a faraway land across the other side of the ocean, education was the sole reason schools existed. The kingdom was filled with monks, scholars and masters with an ostentatious amount of knowledge, wisdom and understanding of all the things that would make the world a better place even after they are gone. They knew all about eras, civilizations and were the shapers of the future.

These masters and scholars combined efforts to form a working system so as to pass these gifts of theirs from generations to generations. It was their dream to see a world with properly informed people making appropriate choices and yielding relevant results.

Welcome to the fifth episode of One Thing You Don’t Have to Know and today, our discourse is on Grammar Schools.

My dad attended one as a teenager and when I was a kid, every time I heard him talk about his school, I could always hear the awe in his voice. It was the best school his parents could have ever sent him. It always felt like he said:

“Though my parents didn’t leave me a trust fund, they enrolled me in a grammar school. That’s enough.”

Grammar schools were first founded in medieval times and they were solely established to teach LATIN. I don’t know if you know this, but a lot of English words (asides those in the urban dictionary) have Latin roots. I’m about to make a joke here, but I’ll leave it. The world is in a sensitive state, the last thing I want to do is to incite a war.

So, these schools were founded to teach Latin and then later evolved to teaching Ancient Greek, then history, mathematics, geography and a lot of other subjects.

If you were also wondering why these schools are called grammar schools, I hope this is a little bit of answer to your curiosity.

Also, ask anyone you know who attended a grammar school to interpret this to you:

Tibi ipsi did vere.