Note: This post offers a condensed history of the evolution of education in the West. Sources are referenced at the end and include literature by a developmental psychologist and a school teacher of 30 years, respectively.
This piece is the second in a series of posts focusing on The Future of Education. The preceding post on education introduced the great opportunity that is waiting, untapped, for innovation in order to bring “schooling” to where it should be both for the world today and for the world as it is developing into our future.
The purpose of this article is to understand the origin of modern day schooling’s foundational practices and in so doing, identifying the problems our education system was initially introduced to solve.
This post will cover the following:
How did the concept of a formal education (i.e. schooling) come about?
What problem was this formal education initially created to solve?
How has/did this formal education evolve to solve those problems? What aspects of education were introduced for what purposes?
Note: we are now discussing “formal education” - which I am defining as any kind of institutional schooling - i.e. where there is a governing body other than the direct teachers or recipients of the education, such as a church, government or board of directors.
Once we understand where schooling came from and why, we can move to look at the needs of today’s world and see where the inconsistencies are between the problem schools were made to solve and the problems we really need education to be solving today, many centuries later.
Let’s start with the history.
The concept of education started roughly 10,000 years ago with the introduction of agriculture. Before then, people largely operated within “hunter-gatherer” communities, which were characterized by groups of people moving around constantly, living off the land and working as a community to provide for all individuals within that community. These communities operated in accordance with egalitarianism, which was also practiced with respect to the children and learning. If a child voiced an opinion on a community matter, everyone was expected to listen and consider the child’s views as one would an adult’s and if any child approached a member of the community seeking to learn a particular skill, that member was expected to teach that child and allow them the opportunity to practice and learn. Of course there were some safeguarding measures, but it was ensured that these did not prevent the independent learning and creativity of the child.
The teaching style and structure of community had evolved to serve the demands of the hunter-gatherer life: social survival required teamwork and modesty and survival as a herd required that members be highly skilled at providing for themselves - namely hunting and gathering. Being an efficient gatherer and an effective hunter required creativity and deep understanding of one’s surroundings and how to work with those surroundings to put food on the table. Thus, the fostering of creativity and curiosity in children was prominent in preparing them to be strong members of the community - encouraging them to be curious and ask questions by approaching other members of the community for guidance, and to practice and play by recreating scenarios they saw the adults involved in or joining the adults in their activities.
The introduction of agriculture, however, fundamentally changed the way societies operated and thus also the education needed to prepare the members of those communities to survive and “thrive” in them. Agriculture enabled people to exert control over the land and to continuously reap from the same plot, which led to a number of changes, all ultimately feeding into the theme of increased control and hierarchy. Landowners controlled those who worked the land, who in turn controlled the land itself. The tools for survival were no longer skills-intensive, but labor-intensive; workers only needed a high stamina and ability to push through a boring day of repetitive behaviors. Creativity as a farmer would be risky because a “creative” decision could lead to a failed crop, which would be a whole year’s food supply gone and that farmer would be answerable to the landowners. For hunter-gatherers, on the other hand, creativity was required to adapt to the changing conditions of nature and the different landscapes they would move between - they needed to be able to take risks and be creative to survive and if they made a mistake, it didn’t ruin a year’s worth of providence. In that sense, the farmer society is much like being a cog in a machine at a large corporate and the hunter-gatherer society, comparable to the functioning of a lean startup. And so, with agriculture, obedience replaced creativity in the survival toolbox.
With hierarchy and land ownership, came also dominant individuals followed by dominant groups, starting with the church and ending with governments and industry giants we see today. As the society in which the primary economic sector (mainly agriculture) developed and reigned supreme, education became closely equated with obedience training and was carried out largely by forcing children to help with either working the fields or taking care of their younger siblings, reducing time for free play. Furthermore, the popularity of corporal punishment began to develop as a way to beat down a child’s “annoying” traits - the desires to move freely, ask questions, try new things on their own - essentially all the natural desires to learn. The intention to teach children to be obedient was undoubtedly initiated to groom children in understanding the hierarchical society of which they were part and to know their place in order to have the best chance of survival in that society - ie be given a place to sleep and eat in return for labor. This at least was true for what was known at the time as the “working class”, and eventually that obedience training spread not just to train and control the poor, but was used by the church and then the state to manage all the masses below the powerhouses.
At the time when the church took hold of power in the west, they claimed a monopoly on knowledge and it was taught that children were naturally sinful and needed to be corrected. There were several evolutions of what this education looked like, however the closest kin to the education we see today was laid out by the Protestant schooling modeled off Prussian schooling and was first introduced in the US as mandatory for children aged 8-14 years in MA, 1852. This schooling was characterized by a standardized curriculum, a clear schedule, enforced discipline and constant supervision. And the stated purpose of this schooling was to break a child’s will, under the assumption that children are naturally sinful and incapable of reason.
That is the origin of modern schooling: obedience training for a hierarchical society. And it’s not difficult to see that. Children are grouped into classes based on ability that’s determined by standardized testing. Children are given instructions and expected to do as they are told and children who ask a lot of questions are seen as annoying and a disturbance to the classroom or they’re seen as slow and requiring too much attention to be in the main class and are thus lumped into implicitly defined “slow” or “underachievers” groups. Children are taught material that is often not put into context of the greater world for them to see how and why learning x will be interesting and useful for them today and in their future. They are in fact expected to engage in rote memorization of facts, figures, dates and methods that they may never need to reference again for the rest of their lives - in some cases we’re even teaching kids theories of science that aren’t even true just because the real theories are apparently too complex for their brains to handle. And they are smarter than some people think.
Children have an intuition for when learning seems pointless and a lot of children in the modern schooling system do feel that way. And do you know the root of where rote memorization came from? The Protestant, Prussian schooling. From 1852. And the very purpose of that schooling was to teach children not to ask questions and to obey and to accept everything they were taught as one accepts religion - on faith - unquestioned. What’s scarier is that rote memorization was also used as a way to dull the children’s minds and spirits in order to prepare them for the world of repetitive action - first for the primary sector work (agriculture), then for the secondary sector work (manufacturing). The education system was literally built to detain creativity and independent thought and to sculpt the brain for repetition.
Again, we can see outdated methodology in today’s schooling when we look at the way modern day schooling uses positive and negative reinforcement and the real origin and reason for that methodology. Today, it is largely unacceptable to have corporal punishment in schools, but the reward/punishment system that’s now in place still serves the same purpose. We work with anxiety-based punishment. Back then it was beatings, today it’s a shameful report card you take home to your parents where your aptitude is given a numerical value, or it’s a ranking system where you’re numbered against your peers. The anxiety-based punishment was largely revered and introduced because it is great for improving rote memorization - you’re anxious so you work hard to “get it right”.
That mentality and method of learning, however, is completely in obstruction of freedom of thought and creativity, because better to take the tried and true route than be punished for trying it a different way or chastised for asking too many questions. The method of shame and anxiety as inhibitors to critical thinking was purposefully introduced at the time to ensure people conformed and grew acclimated to the monotonous and unthinking nature of work and life that they were preparing for. And this is the form of education that persists in our school systems today. The problem? Today the primary and secondary sector are not the main or only economic sectors. Furthermore, today innovation is pushing every sector and every field forward and that requires creativity and the will and grit to try and fail and try again to make things better. That is what people are hiring for - interview questions are all about critical thinking and a person’s ability to problem-solve - and yet that is not what we are teaching or promoting in schools.
In preparation for this writing on the history of education, I read several pieces of literature (referenced at the end) and it is widely agreed upon and painfully clear that the inception of modern day schooling came from a place of fear and control. Fear of the masses, fear of the power of the individual, fear of the critical thinker and the questioner and what they might figure out and be able to achieve. But we are living in a world where all those things feared are what it takes to survive in this world such that the fear needs to be driven out of our education system. We need to move away from education as a tool for control over its students and redefine education as a tool given to those students to control their own futures, to become self-teachers, independent thinkers and lifelong learners. We need to revert back to teaching creativity, whilst driving the way we do so forward using what we know about the world around us from science, history and philosophy to foster a human being’s inherent desire to learn. We are born hungry for information and learning; educating a child shouldn’t seem so tedious and foreboding to that child when it’s as encoded into their DNA as the desire to play.
The purpose of this article was to demonstrate how the basic foundations of a formal education (i.e. institutional schooling) in today’s world were made to prepare young minds for a society that no longer dominates. The education system we have today is not preparing people for our world, it’s setting them back and teaching behaviors and dependencies that are bound to fail outside of the school bubble. Having taken a look at the history and origin of our education system, we can see what elements of education are preparing children for what kind of experiences and dispositions. Thus, we can see which elements need to be removed completely in order not to teach and prepare for the wrong future and an outdated reality.
The next step is then to figure out what we need to replace those elements with for the education of today. Given that there are so many flawed elements at the foundation of education, the best ideas for what that new education could look like will not just present an altered version of today’s schooling, but something completely different. In my next article, I will look at what the problems are today that education needs to be solving and what children need to learn in order to survive and thrive in this society, identifying the survival toolbox of the 21st century. The closing article of The Future of Education series will be an ideation piece, suggesting what that new system could actually look like.
Note: If you found this content interesting and would like to dive deeper into the origin of and dangers posed by the current schooling system, check out the following sources from which most of this information was pulled:
“A Brief History of Education”, article, Peter Gray (developmental psychologist)
“Free to Learn”, book, Peter Gray (extended version of article)
“Dumbing Us Down”, book, John Taylor Gatto (teacher of 30 years and recipient of the New York State Teacher of the Year award)