Given the general illiteracy, the lack of public libraries, the high cost of Torah copies and writing materials, how would a person become a rabbi in 1 CE?
Given the costs and reading/writing requisites it looks like it's a path only for sons of well-off families, living in a major city.
I have read Israel Finkelstein and Bart Ehrman books, which deal mostly with literacy but doesn't explore education.
In the year one common era even if books would have been easily available it would have made little difference in relation to becoming a Rabbi and Jewish Education. At that point in time, on principle, almost nothing had been written down anyway.
This was seventy years before the Beis Hamikdash was destroyed, and about two hundred years before the Mishna was written down. It was forbidden to write a public record of the Oral Law. Being that almost everything was being learned by memory anyhow the lack of or easy availability of books would have had little bearing on studying to become a rabbi
