Sappho
Women in Education History
EDCI658
Fall, 2006
Sappho’s Life and Times
• First female music teacher
• Poet
• First health and physical education teacher for
girls
• Born around 630 B. C. on the island of Lesbos
to an aristocratic family
• Sappo’s life and works are known today
through the oldest bibliographical source in
existence, the Byzantine Encyclopedic work
Suda(written about 100 A. C.)
Sappho’s Life and Times
• Married Cercylas of Andros, a very wealthy
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businessman
Had one daughter
Aristocratic world view is reflected in her poems
Had intimate relationships with three companions
and friends, maybe her male lovers
Greek biography found on papyrus indicated that
Sappho might be accused by having a woman
lover as well
Sappho’s Life and Times
• She wrote passionate poetry to other women, for
her, marriage and lesbianism were not necessarily
exclusive
• Certain historians found that having relationships
with both man and women were common in her
time
• Education in Greece were separated for boys and
girls, for different age groups, and for children
with different status even if the education in
Sparta Greece was wide spread
Sappho’s Life and Times
• Sappho was the head of a girl’s school
• Her poems were stanzas consisting of three
lines of 11 syllabus followed by a single line of
five syllabus following a formal pattern of
“long” and “short”
• Writing was limited in her time; she might have
written her poems on lead or gold and
dedicated them to the temples
Sappho’s Life and Times
• First female independent thinker
• Plato called her “the tenth muse”
• Other women throughout the history of
western literature, especially those writing in
Greek or Latin, were called “the tenth muse”
or another Sappho
• Later dramas and plays often portray Sappho
as their main characters; for example, a French
opera was named for her Sapho
• Two versions of Sappho’s Death
Sappho and Education
• Head of a girl’s school from elite, aristocratic
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families
Music and dance teacher
Sex educator and physical education instructor
Reading teacher
Educational philosophy: believe in the
education of the whole student and attached
equal importance to all areas of education;
emphasized a mentor-mentee relationship
between teachers and learners
Resources about Sappho
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http://www.sappho.com/poetry/sappho.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho
http://www.temple.edu/classics/sappho.html
http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/sappho/index.ht
m#life
• http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/sappho/sappbio
1.htm (Divine Sappho)
Sample Poems
• The Show Pupil
• Lament for a Lost Student
• Hymn to Aphrodite
(Murphy, Madonna, 2006, p.22-23)
• Citation of the book:
Murphy, M. (2006). The history and
philosophy of education: Voices of
educational pioneers. Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall
Sappho’s Relevance to Today’s Education
• Current research on single-sex schools
• The education of women and the role of
women in education
• Sex and health education in school and the
issues such as AIDS and teenage pregnancy
• Teacher-student relationship? Befriend
students?