#1 - History of Education
A real history of education would be hundreds of pages and volumes in length. All we’re trying to do here is create a flavor of the history so we can talk about where we are today and where we should go in the future.
In caveman days, education probably amounted to teaching men how to hunt or make tools and women how to manage the cave or make clothes. Education was a sort of apprenticeship or learning by necessity, example and demonstration.
It wasn’t until writing was invented that education took hold and evolved. With writing, you could capture it, repeat it and evolve it over time.
The concept of a “classroom” goes back to Ancient Greece. Students were assembled in at certain location and teaching took place.
While a motive of most ancient governments was to increase the literacy of regular citizens, there was also a need to educate the military with knowledge about fighting and to provide a minimum level of general education to the soldiers. Leaders came to realize that citizens with some education were easier to govern. They also realized that warriors with an education won more battles and were better at killing people.
In the ancient days, education was limited to the upper classas a method of keeping the population under control. Often, education was limited to scribes and elites.
In the Middle Ages, schools were mostly religious. While public schools were rare, religious schools were everywhere. Church leaders wanted to strengthen their congregation through better education giving their particular parish or sect a leg up.
As the Enlightenment Period surfaced, public schools and universities began to become more prevalent offering grammar through university courses. Schools and teachers developed standardized ways of teaching the basics. The curricula evolved becoming more comprehensive in their coverage of subjects and specialized teaching. Obligatory attendance had its genesis during this time period.
In the Nineteenth Century, the Progressive Movement was born challenging many of the traditional tenets of education. The Progressive Movement originated the idea that you could influence a student’s thinking by the content of the curricula. There has been an explosion of “discoveries” in the last 150 years. A lot of them are covert attempts to tell us WHAT to think, not contributions towards fundamentals, HOW to think or how to express yourself.
Today, education has been infiltrated with many different “ologies” and ways of thinking. At the same time, we seem to have forgotten or cancelled many of the fundamentals.
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