Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Yes, there's IS literally a "guy who invented college"...

"An academy is an institution of secondary education or higher learning, research, or honorary membership. The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, founded approximately 385 BC at Akademia (...) north of Athens, Greece".

This has been the early prototype for later roman, middle-ages, renaissance and finally modern colleges.

It wasn't the first teacher or even school were children were taught, but it was the first higher learning institution, with organized courses and mostly modern form.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_higher-learning_instit...

Comparing it to the "guy who invented language"? As if it's something communally developed, whose origins are lost in prehistoric times? Really?

View on HN

The same wikipedia article goes on to say

[these academies] are to be distinguished from the Western-style university which is an autonomous organization of scholars that originated in medieval Europe and was adopted in other world regions since the onset of modern times

I only copy/pasted that part to provide the exact dates and location.

Other than that, it's neither a well written article nor very accurate. In any case, the missing part before your quoted text is not "these academies". The article talks about several "ancient higher-learning institutions were developed in many cultures to provide institutional frameworks for scholarly activities". That part of the article is quite sloppy too (mentioning "museums", "scientific institutions" in a lemma referring to antiquity [1]).

Then it goes on to refer to the Academy too, later on, but even so, it undermines its own differentiation, as the Academy was both an "Autonomous organization"(check), and of "scholars" (check).

It didn't follow the full template of how a univerity today is (that starts around the 16th century), but it was most of the way there and is widely regarded as the precursor of the modern university (even the name "academic" is not a coincidence).

Now, my intention of reffering to the Academy was to give an example that the earliest college is something that we got in historical times and we know who created it (contrary to what the parents wrote).

If, as you suggest, we maintain that the first "actual" college was created even later, that serves me even better.

[1] There were museums in antiquity, but extremely few, and of them we know nothing much, and especially not that they operated any schools.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com