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From: Tim on 22 Aug 2008 08:55
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200808/why-schools-are-what-they-are-i-a-brief-history-education


When we see that children everywhere are required by law to go to
school, that almost all schools are structured in the same way, and that
our society goes to a great deal of trouble and expense to provide such
schools, we tend naturally to assume that there must be some good,
logical reason for all this. Perhaps if we didn't force children to go
to school, or if schools operated much differently, children would not
grow up to be competent adults. Perhaps some really smart people have
figured all this out and have proven it in some way, or perhaps
alternative ways of thinking about child development and education have
been tested and have failed.

In previous postings I have presented evidence to the contrary. In
particular, in my August 13 posting, I described the Sudbury Valley
School, where for 40 years children have been educating themselves in a
setting that operates on assumptions that are opposite to those of
traditional schooling. Studies of the school and its graduates show that
normal, average children become educated through their own play and
exploration, without adult direction or prodding, and go on to be
fulfilled, effective adults in the larger culture. Instead of providing
direction and prodding, the school provides a rich setting within which
to play, explore, and experience democracy first hand; and it does that
at lower expense and with less trouble for all involved than is required
to operate standard schools. So why aren't most schools like that?

If we want to understand why standard schools are what they are, we have
to abandon the idea that they are products of logical necessity or
scientific insight. They are, instead, products of history. Schooling,
as it exists today, only makes sense if we view it from a historical
perspective. And so, as a first step toward explaining why schools are
what they are, I present here, in a nutshell, an outline of the history
of education, from the beginning of humankind until now. Most scholars
of educational history would use different terms than I use here, but I
doubt that they would deny the overall accuracy of the sketch. In fact,
I have used the writings of such scholars to help me develop the sketch.

In the beginning, for hundreds of thousands of years, children educated
themselves through self-directed play and exploration.

In relation to the biological history of our species, schools are very
recent institutions. For hundreds of thousands of years, before the
advent of agriculture, we lived as hunter-gatherers. In my August 2
posting, I summarized the evidence from anthropology that children in
hunter-gatherer cultures learned what they needed to know to become
effective adults through their own play and exploration. The strong
drives in children to play and explore presumably came about, during our
evolution as hunter-gatherers, to serve the needs of education. Adults
in hunter-gatherer cultures allowed children almost unlimited freedom to
play and explore on their own because they recognized that those
activities are children's natural ways of learning.

With the rise of agriculture, and later of industry, children became
forced laborers. Play and exploration were suppressed. Willfulness,
which had been a virtue, became a vice that had to be beaten out of
children.

The invention of agriculture, beginning 10,000 years ago in some parts
of the world and later in other parts, set in motion a whirlwind of
change in people's ways of living. The hunter-gatherer way of life had
been skill-intensive and knowledge-intensive, but not labor-intensive.
To be effective hunters and gatherers, people had to acquire a vast
knowledge of the plants and animals on which they depended and of the
landscapes within which they foraged. They also had to develop great
skill in crafting and using the tools of hunting and gathering. They had
to be able to take initiative and be creative in finding foods and
tracking game. However, they did not have to work long hours; and the
work they did was exciting, not dreary. Anthropologists have reported
that the hunter-gatherer groups they studied did not distinguish between
work and play--essentially all of life was understood as play.

Agriculture gradually changed all that. With agriculture, people could
produce more food, which allowed them to have more children. Agriculture
also allowed people (or forced people) to live in permanent dwellings,
where their crops were planted, rather than live a nomadic life, and
this in turn allowed people to accumulate property. But these changes
occurred at a great cost in labor. While hunter-gatherers skillfully
harvested what nature had grown, farmers had to plow, plant, cultivate,
tend their flocks, and so on. Successful farming required long hours of
relatively unskilled, repetitive labor, much of which could be done by
children. With larger families, children had to work in the fields to
help feed their younger siblings, or they had to work at home to help
care for those siblings. Children's lives changed gradually from the
free pursuit of their own interests to increasingly more time spent at
work that was required to serve the rest of the family.

Agriculture and the associated ownership of land and accumulation of
property also created, for the first time in history, clear status
differences. People who did not own land became dependent on those who
did. Also, landowners discovered that they could increase their own
wealth by getting other people to work for them. Systems of slavery and
other forms of servitude developed. Those with wealth could become even
wealthier with the help of others who depended on them for survival. All
this culminated with feudalism in the Middle Ages, when society became
steeply hierarchical, with a few kings and lords at the top and masses
of slaves and serfs at the bottom. Now the lot of most people, children
included, was servitude. The principal lessons that children had to
learn were obedience, suppression of their own will, and the show of
reverence toward lords and masters. A rebellious spirit could well
result in death.

In the Middle Ages, lords and masters had no qualms about physically
beating children into submission. For example, in one document from the
late 14th or early 15th century, a French count advised that nobles'
huntsmen should "choose a boy servant as young as seven or eight" and
that "...this boy should be beaten until he has a proper dread of
failing to carry out his masters orders."[1] The document went on to
list a prodigious number of chores that the boy would perform daily and
noted that he would sleep in a loft above the hounds at night in order
to attend to the dogs' needs.

With the rise of industry and of a new bourgeoisie class, feudalism
gradually subsided, but this did not immediately improve the lives of
most children. Business owners, like landowners, needed laborers and
could profit by extracting as much work from them as possible with as
little compensation as possible. Everyone knows of the exploitation that
followed and still exists in many parts of the world. People, including
young children, worked most of their waking hours, seven days a week, in
beastly conditions, just to survive. The labor of children was moved
from fields, where there had at least been sunshine, fresh air, and some
opportunities to play, into dark, crowded, dirty factories. In England,
overseers of the poor commonly farmed out paupers' children to
factories, where they were treated as slaves. Many thousand of them died
each year of diseases, starvation, and exhaustion. Not until the 19th
century did England pass laws limiting child labor. In 1883, for
example, new legislation forbade textile manufacturers from employing
children under the age of 9 and limited the maximum weekly work hours to
48 for 10- to 12-year-olds and to 69 for 13- to 17-year-olds [2].

In sum, for several thousand years after the advent of agriculture, the
education of children was, to a considerable degree, a matter squashing
their willfulness in order to make them good laborers. A good child was
an obedient child, who suppressed his or her urge to play and explore
and dutifully carried out the orders of adult masters. Such education,
fortunately, was never fully successful. The human instincts to play and
explore are so powerful that they can never be fully beaten out of a
child. But certainly the philosophy of education throughout that period,
to the degree that it could be articulated, was the opposite of the
philosophy that hunter-gatherers had held for hundreds of thousands of
years earlier.

For various reasons, some religious and some secular, the idea of
universal, compulsory education arose and gradually spread. Education
was understood as inculcation.

As industry progressed and became somewhat more automated, the need for
child labor declined in some parts of the world. The idea began to
spread that childhood should be a time for learning, and schools for
children were developed as places of learning. The idea and practice of
universal, compulsory public education developed gradually in Europe,
from the early 16th century on into the 19th. It was an idea that had
many supporters, who all had their own agendas concerning the lessons
that children should learn.

Much of the impetus for universal education came from the emerging
Protestant religions. Martin Luther declared that salvation depends on
each person's own reading of the Scriptures. A corollary, not lost on
Luther, was that each person must learn to read and must also learn that
the Scriptures represent absolute truths and that salvation depends on
understanding those truths. Luther and other leaders of the Reformation
promoted public education as Christian duty, to save souls from eternal
damnation. By the end of the 17th century, Germany, which was the leader
in the development of schooling, had laws in most of its states
requiring that children attend school; but the Lutheran church, not the
state, ran the schools [3].

In America, in the mid 17th century, Massachusetts became the first
colony to mandate schooling, the clearly stated purpose of which was to
turn children into good Puritans. Beginning in 1690, children in
Massachusetts and adjacent colonies learned to read from the New England
Primer, known colloquially as "The Little Bible of New England" [4]. It
included a set of short rhymes to help children learn the alphabet,
beginning with, "In Adam's Fall, We sinned all," and ending with,
"Zaccheus he, Did climb the tree, His Lord to see." The Primer also
included the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and various
lessons designed to instill in children a fear of God and a sense of
duty to their elders.

Employers in industry saw schooling as a way to create better workers.
To them, the most crucial lessons were punctuality, following
directions, tolerance for long hours of tedious work, and a minimal
ability to read and write. From their point of view (though they may not
have put it this way), the duller the subjects taught in schools the better.

As nations gelled and became more centralized, national leaders saw
schooling as means of creating good patriots and future soldiers. To
them, the crucial lessons were about the glories of the fatherland, the
wondrous achievements and moral virtues of the nation's founders and
leaders, and the necessity to defend the nation from evil forces elsewhere.

Into this mix we must add reformers who truly cared about children,
whose messages may ring sympathetically in our ears today. These are
people who saw schools as places for protecting children from the
damaging forces of the outside world and for providing children with the
moral and intellectual grounding needed to develop into upstanding,
competent adults. But they too had their agenda for what children should
learn. Children should learn moral lessons and disciplines, such as
Latin and mathematics, that would exercise their minds and turn them
into scholars.

So, everyone involved in the founding and support of schools had a clear
view about what lessons children should learn in school. Quite
correctly, nobody believed that children left to their own devices, even
in a rich setting for learning, would all learn just exactly the lessons
that they (the adults) deemed to be so important. All of them saw
schooling as inculcation, the implanting of certain truths and ways of
thinking into children's minds. The only known method of inculcation,
then as well as now, is forced repetition and testing for memory of what
was repeated.

With the rise of schooling, people began to think of learning as
children's work. The same power-assertive methods that had been used to
make children work in fields and factories were quite naturally
transferred to the classroom.

Repetition and memorization of lessons is tedious work for children,
whose instincts urge them constantly to play freely and explore the
world on their own. Just as children did not adapt readily to laboring
in fields and factories, they did not adapt readily to schooling. This
was no surprise to the adults involved. By this point in history, the
idea that children's own willfulness had any value was pretty well
forgotten. Everyone assumed that to make children learn in school the
children's willfulness would have to be beaten out of them. Punishments
of all sorts were understood as intrinsic to the educational process. In
some schools children were permitted certain periods of play (recess),
to allow them to let off steam; but play was not considered to be a
vehicle of learning. In the classroom, play was the enemy of learning.

A prominent attitude of eighteenth century school authorities toward
play is reflected in John Wesley's rules for Wesleyan schools, which
included the statement: "As we have no play days, so neither do we allow
any time for play on any day; for he that plays as a child will play as
a man."[5]

The brute force methods long used to keep children on task on the farm
or in the factory were transported into schools to make children learn.
Some of the underpaid, ill-prepared schoolmasters were clearly sadistic.
One master in Germany kept records of the punishments he meted out in 51
years of teaching, a partial list of which included: "911,527 blows with
a rod, 124,010 blows with a cane, 20,989 taps with a ruler, 136,715
blows with the hand, 10,235 blows to the mouth, 7,905 boxes on the ear,
and 1,118,800 blows on the head"[6]. Clearly, that master was proud of
all the educating he had done.

In his autobiography, John Bernard, a prominent eighteenth-century
Massachusetts minister, described approvingly how he himself, as a
child, was beaten regularly by his schoolmaster [7]. He was beaten
because of his irresistible drive to play; he was beaten when he failed
to learn; he was even beaten when his classmates failed to learn.
Because he was a bright boy, he was put in charge of helping the others
learn, and when they failed to recite a lesson properly he was beaten
for that. His only complaint was that one classmate deliberately flubbed
his lessons in order to see him beaten. He solved that problem, finally,
by giving the classmate "a good drubbing" when the school day was over
and threatening more drubbings in the future. Those were the good old days.

In recent times, the methods of schooling have become less harsh, but
basic assumptions have not changed. Learning continues to be defined as
children's work, and power assertive means are used to make children do
that work.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, public schooling gradually evolved
toward what we all recognize today as conventional schooling. The
methods of discipline became more humane, or at least less corporal; the
lessons became more secular; the curriculum expanded, as knowledge
expanded, to include an ever-growing list of subjects; and the number of
hours, days, and years of compulsory schooling increased continuously.
School gradually replaced fieldwork, factory work, and domestic chores
as the child's primary job. Just as adults put in their 8-hour day at
their place of employment, children today put in their 6-hour day at
school, plus another hour or more of homework, and often more hours of
lessons outside of school. Over time, children's lives have become
increasingly defined and structured by the school curriculum. Children
now are almost universally identified by their grade in school, much as
adults are identified by their job or career.

Schools today are much less harsh than they were, but certain premises
about the nature of learning remain unchanged: Learning is hard work; it
is something that children must be forced to do, not something that will
happen naturally through children's self-chosen activities. The specific
lessons that children must learn are determined by professional
educators, not by children, so education today is still, as much as
ever, a matter of inculcation (though educators tend to avoid that term
and use, falsely, terms like "discovery").

Clever educators today might use "play" as a tool to get children to
enjoy some of their lessons, and children might be allowed some free
playtime at recess (though even this is decreasing in very recent
times), but children's own play is certainly understood as inadequate as
a foundation for education. Children whose drive to play is so strong
that they can't sit still for lessons are no longer beaten; instead,
they are medicated.

School today is the place where all children learn the distinction that
hunter-gatherers never knew--the distinction between work and play. The
teacher says, "you must do your work and then you can play." Clearly,
according to this message, work, which encompasses all of school
learning, is something that one does not want to do but must; and play,
which is everything that one wants to do, has relatively little value.
That, perhaps, is the leading lesson of our method of schooling. If
children learn nothing else in school, they learn the difference between
work and play and that learning is work, not play.

In this posting I have tried to explain how the history of humanity has
led to the development of schools as we know them today. In my next
posting I will discuss some reasons why modern attempts to reform
schools in basic ways have been so ineffective.

-----------
Notes

1. Quoted by Orme, N. (2001), Medieval children, p 315.
2. Mulhern, J. (1959), A history of education: A social interpretation,
2nd edition.
3. Again, Mulhern (1959).
4. Gutek, G. L. (1991), An historical introduction to American
education, 2nd edition.
5. Quoted by Mullhern (1959, p 383).
6. Again, in Mullhern (1959, p 383).
7. From �Autobiography of the Rev. John Bernard,� Collections of the
Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd Ser., 5 [1836]: 178-182. Extracted
in J. Martin (Ed.) (2007), Children in Colonial America.
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