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This book is about how young learners in Greece learned to be Greek in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in informal educational settings. This introductory chapter addresses the main questions that this book sets out to answer, explores informal learning’s historical contours by evaluating change and continuity over time, and considers social, political, and cultural factors that impacted informal learning. By focusing on the importance of informal learning in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Greece, this book addresses learning outside the school.

This chapter examines the school textbook and the school experience. While most of this book is focused on learning outside the centralized Greek school, it is difficult to ignore the role that the school played in influencing what children learned in informal learning settings. Historically, the modern school, which is generally an extension of the state apparatus, regulates what children learn and how they learn through the promotion of a state-mandated curricula, the adoption of textbooks and the preparation and selection of teachers through state-designated or supervised teacher-training programs. Informal education in Greece was in many ways regulated by the Greek state and helped serve the state’s interests and agendas.

This chapter examines Greek folk tales and songs taught in informal learning settings. One will see in this chapter that many of the first folk tales that children learned were Aesop’s fables. These creative stories, originally written by the prolific ancient Greek fabler, Aesop, and later adapted for a modern Greek audience, brought to life the natural and physical environment while at the same time engaged young learners to solve a moral or ethical dilemma. Children’s shadow theater was also popular for much of nineteenth and early twentieth century Greece. The most notorious children’s theater of the time was the so-called Karagiozis shadow puppet shows. The Karagiozis puppet shows traveled and performed in almost every town and city in Greece, entertaining generations of Greek children. Karagiozis, the protagonist of the theater shows, a poor, swarthy, disheveled humpback Greek, electrified children audiences for over a century through his comical and well-orchestrated antics.

This chapter considers several personal accounts from the time by several individuals. Personal accounts from Christos Christovasilis, Alexandros Papadiamandis, Nikos Kazantzakis, Nikiforos Lytras and Nicholaos Gyzis help shed light on the impact that informal learning had on these individuals. Much of the autobiographical literature suggests that the stories learned by these individuals were both religious and secular in nature. Most of them learned stories from ancient Greek mythology and history, as well as biblical stories, local folk tales, and more contemporary tales that dealt with Greece’s Ottoman and revolutionary pasts.

This chapter concludes this book with a discussion of future research directions for informal learning as well as the importance of informal learning for future studies.

This chapter examines late nineteenth and early twentieth century Greek children’s literature. The chapter begins with a discussion on the importance of reading in informal learning contexts and how children’s literature and other stories learned by children in informal learning settings helped shape the child’s national identity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wealth of children’s magazines and books were popularized and read by children both outside and within Greek schools. Some of these stories were imported into Greece from western Europe, while others were Greek-authored.

This chapter explores childhood and the Greek family and community in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Greece. In this chapter, one will find that the family was important throughout Greece and considered a fundamental unit where values and customs were transmitted to children in informal learning settings. Informal learning, however, differed between rural and urban communities. Social–structural differences between rural and urban communities were vast, while class and income also played an important role in how children learned. In rural communities, the family and other members of the community directed much of the learning for children.