Education from antiquity to the present - looking for the origins of assessments

y Assessment is one of the steps of the teaching and learning process. It is defined in the syllabus and in the lesson plans, and it differs from other school practices because of its immediate goal: check students' progress; students' development and/or performance in a particular discipline or course. In this article, the discussion is from a historical and theoretical perspective, because we aim to reflect on assessment, its motivations, its results, as well as on the way it reflects on the relationship between teacher and student, between them and the teaching elements, and between the school and the world. Because of that, based on Manacorda, Perrenoud, Libaneo and Mizukami 's studies, among others, we have considered the history of education to identify evidences of assessment over time and identify the importance of education in different societies. Besides that, we have reflected on the assessment definition and we have identified how different teaching approaches conceive assessment. During the analysis, we have realized that the assessment is part of the men history and it is still present today, and it has been considered both as an educational practice, and as a structuring practice, since it may be, implicitly, responsible for a social restructuring or for the maintenance of the initial social state of subjects.