While the Vikings were not a civilization as some would have it, and to others were little more than bands of savages on marauding raids from Scandinavia, the facts are to the contrary. The Viking families lived in settled villages back 
home, had refined their shipbuilding techniques to levels that still set standards for building with overlapping planks, and were past-masters in the art of navigation across vast tracts of lonely oceans. Sometimes the men were away at sea for years – how did the Vikings left at home teach children the lessons that they would need if their father’s boat never entered the bay again at the end of a long ocean journey? Of what did Viking education consist?
The Viking people were strangely disinterested in their history and recorded little beyond their runic inscriptions on stones. Their cryptic notes served practical uses like marking graves, recording greetings and casting spells and curses, and so it seems that they had little time for history in a world where life could be so transient. It is however not unreasonable to 
surmise that their children were educated in similar ways to most other civilizations at the tail end of the Dark Ages.
It is highly unlikely that formal schooling existed in view of their rudimentary language. Thus the only structured training would have been instruction in Viking mythology by priests, who would have passed on sagas of past glory too. For the rest, it seems that children had to work as soon as they were old enough, and that what passed for Viking education was little more than teaching practical skills. Boys in Viking families would have been taught boat building, weapon making, fine goldsmith work and the art of war. Girls learned how to manage households when the 
men were absent and care for livestock. All this is believed to have taken place in a happy family environment, since Viking warriors at home are remembered as loving fathers who treated their wives as equals.
There is an echo of this tradition in the way that modern Scandinavians educate their children too. Tourists sometimes refer to them as kid-friendly people, because of the trouble that they take to prepare their youth for adult life. A link in the chain that goes back to Viking days must be broken somewhere though, for they are honest traders on the world’s stage these days, not fiery brigands like their warlike ancestors.
