When Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing press during the Renaissance, it was a game-changer. Like the internet five centuries later, the printing press's influence altered the way people learned, shared knowledge, spread opinions and amused themselves. Its effects include the impact of the printing press on education, for example vastly increasing the number of people who learned to read.

The History of Literacy

Writing and reading go together. Without written material, there's no use to literacy; without readers, there's no use to writing anything. Both reading and writing depend on cultural developments such as a common set of symbols, like the modern alphabet.

Documents written in numbers go back as far as 8000 BC. The symbols ancient cultures used for numbers eventually became symbols for words as well, which led to the development of written text. Humans were reading and writing words by 3200 BC, but it was a rare skill, limited mostly to scribes, scholars and priests.

Ancient cultures employed a variety of systems and symbols in writing. They also used a variety of surfaces such as papyrus, clay, stone, paper and sheepskin. Without printing, everything had to be handwritten and, if duplicates were needed, hand-copied.

The Printing Press Pre-Renaissance

Gutenberg wasn't the first person to see the advantages of the printing press over copies made by hand. China developed woodblock printing probably by 600 AD. In this method, the printer etched an entire page into a block of wood, which could be inked and used to create multiple copies.

The block-printing press's influence was limited because creating one block per page took lots of time. It still made it easier to share information by producing copies of books on agriculture, medicine or religion. However, education and literacy remained the province of the upper classes, who believed peasants and workers had no need for such knowledge.

In the 11th century, the printer Bi Sheng invented the superior movable-type method, where multiple smaller blocks printed one character each. The advantages of a printing press of this sort was that by rearranging a set of blocks, they could print multiple different pages. As written, Chinese contains thousands of characters, so this didn't speed printing up as much as Gutenberg's movable type would later.

The Printing Press's Renaissance Beginning

The impact of the printing press on education became clear right away. While Gutenberg's printed Bible is his most famous creation, one of his first creations may have been a textbook. The Ars Minor was a fourth-century Latin work widely used in teaching Latin, the language of science and learning in Gutenberg's time.

Several printed copies of Ars Minor exist from the 14th century. It's possible, but not certain, that Gutenberg printed a run of the book before starting on his Bible. There was a guaranteed market for Ars Minor in schools, which would have helped Gutenberg raise money before investing in the bigger, ambitious Bible project.

However, it's also possible the printed Ars Minor from that era were run off after Gutenberg's Bible. After 550 years, it's hard to say for sure.