Lecture 3: “History of Education”
Today we are going to superficially discuss the history of education, or at least start it. I have very strong biases and for this hope you understand the distinction. I have the bias that the most important thing for a human being is to have perspective. Perspective is the name of the game. It is what distinguishes us from animals, which have no perspective, consciousness, or choice. The exercise of that choice is our conscious decision making which is very precious. And so, one way of thinking about the task of life is to understand, that what we are about is figuring out how to make the most informed choices. There is a whole world out there that we do not know about or is new to us. So how do we engage that world? One of the things which are exciting is that the world of the late 20th century is so much more complex than the world of any century before. Right now, we have more to do with all the nations of the world than at any time in our history and the information we have to make decisions with is so much more comprehensive than at any time in the past. So the way in which we go about making our decisions are very strongly shaped by many more influences than there used to be. There are, of course, some things that we cannot choose and others that we can. Our task is to figure out how to exercise those choices when we have them. History is one of the least appreciated subjects in the curriculum. History is exciting, but the way we teach it is really dumb. We teach it as though it is just a long string of dates and they are boring beyond belief. We must figure out how to make it come alive. It is when history lives that we are then able to find a way to use its lessons. How do we use those lessons by knowing the date a particular war took place? That is not very useful information. It does not help us in any substantial way. Today even though we will have a very superficial look at the history of American education, we will see some of the small ideas in the history of education that made us the way we are now. When we look at the reason to study history, we are actually figuring out how to inform our choices. That is what it is all about.
Let's see how you do on a rather special kind of general history quiz. This quiz is designed to test your historical intuition. Since you are not really expected to know the answers, answering two of the six questions correctly is considered a "passing grade." But of course, the "grade" you get is not the issue - the reason we include the quiz is to have a bit of fun with history. Incidentally all the answers come from Daniel Boorstin's book, The Discoverers .
History Quiz.
How many the opportunities we miss to make history come alive - to intrigue us with its unexpected twists and turns, the vagaries and accidents which have shaped our past and which will continue to shape our future. One of the things that still boggles our minds about Columbus, was that we have no idea if the routes he chose for his first voyage to the New World were by accident, or because he was an extraordinary navigator. The routes he chose - both directions - were ideal for the whole age of sailing. How he figured that out, no one has a clue. It is obvious that when you have been there and done that, then you know about the winds. But no one has any idea how Columbus figured it out. This is one of the nice little mysteries of history.
Question:
How much do you know about the past, present and future? How certain are you about the past, the present, and the future? On a scale of 1-10 (1 - knowing absolutely nothing to 10 - knowing everything), how do you rate?
1. The past
Click Here for Answer #1
2. The present
Click Here for Answer #2
3. The future
Click Here for Answer #3
4. How long is the present (in words or numbers)?
Click Here for Answer #4
If I were to rate these items myself, I would give myself a 5 or 6 on the past, present and future. I know as much about the future as I do about the past. When we fail to realize how much we know about the future, we do not use the information available to us and there is much available to us to study the future. This information can really make a huge difference in the way we act if we would use it. But we have the idea that we do not know much about the future and that allows us to act in such a way as to disregard all that valuable knowledge that is already there.
It's not that we know more about the near future than the distant future. Allow me to give you an example. I'm a whole lot more sure that none of us in this class will be alive in 100 years from now, than I am that none of us will be dead in 1 year from now. You get the point. There is a great deal of useful information out there. Another example would be understanding of the cycle of the seasons. Anytime a farmer plants a crop, he is making a prediction about the future, rain patterns, and all sorts of things. We make predictions all the time.
The job of the teacher is to help students study the future. The irony is, this is what teaching is all about. My point here is that the study of the future is one of the most important things for a teacher to do. One way to do this is to study the past. It's one of the tools to study the future. All of these things together are part of the reason that I think it is important for you to at least start thinking about the history of education. I wish that I could give you a more comprehensive view because again, I think that there are really neat and exciting things going on in the history of education, that we will not have time to look at. Even in our superficial view, we will take a little bit of time out to look at some of the fun things, as well as the important things.
I want to share the history of education as the grand markers of perspective over the centuries. I want to give you a sample of the events that have shaped our history in American education and indeed the history of the future. I think of this as the march of education over the centuries. And, the first century we will look at is the 17th century.
We will choose only a few things to look at in each century. First of all, in the 17th Century, education was private. Right now, in the United States, we have a really solid tradition in public education. We assume that education is a public responsibility. It would be absolutely absurd to think that education should be a completely private venture. That is something that has changed dramatically since the 17th century. All education in the US was private; at least it started that way. And this was true for both religious and secular education, although most education was religious. Harvard, the first private higher educational institution was founded to train clergy. In other words, the purpose of Harvard was religious.
One thing that is really fun about Harvard history, is that it would have been a completely different institutions if its first President had not become sea sick. The fact that he did probably substantially changed the history of All-American education. The story behind this is that a man named Comenius, who was one of the most progressive educators in Europe, was invited to be the President of Harvard, and he accepted. He boarded the ship to come to the New World and the first day out he got so sea sick that he went back and never made it to Harvard. Comenius was a much more progressive educator than Harvard has seen even to this day. He remains in the history of world's education as one of the great progressive educators of his era. And, if he had been the one to shape the destiny of Harvard, I am convinced that Harvard would have been a very different institution. It may not have survived. You never know. But it would have been very different. No one much thinks about how the history of American education was influenced by the fact that Comenius got seasick.
We like to think that the world is a very rational world; and no doubt there are many things in the world that are rational. But there are as many things in the world that are not rational. In other words, if we are going to understand the world, we must understand rational things and irrational things. We must understand that as human beings we are thinking beings and feeling beings. It’s that combination of thinking and feeling that produces the nature of which we are. Just viewing the purpose of schooling as rational, is to completely miss the point. It has never been that way and it never will be. Although we, at times, act as if it is that way. And when we act as if the purpose of education is very simplistic rational purpose, we miss the point. When we teach history and the important thing is to put everything into a date, you miss the point. The important reason to study history is to weed out the important lessons it teaches; to tell us why we act the way we are acting now and how we might act differently. That's the purpose of history.
In many ways, it's interesting that in Western culture, we put a lot of emphasis on dates. In China they don't. They put more emphasis on periods. For example, when you study Chinese history, you will find that the Chinese can almost never tell you the date of anything. But what they can tell you is in which dynasty an event took place. Different dynasties had different major elements. These elements included the ways they thought about life and the way they organized things. The dynasty will locate an approximate date. That's a much better system than memorizing specific dates. If kids understand that an event happened about the time of the Civil War, or the turn of the century, or after the First World War, isn't that good enough? That's about as much information as you will use. One of the reasons it becomes laughable is that Columbus discovered America during the most recent great dynasty in Chinese history, the Ming Dynasty. Since then, they have had the Ching Dynasty, which was the dynasty that ended with the revolution. The Ching dynasty was the last dynasty. So all of American history has been modern small potatoes in terms of Chinese history. Chinese laugh when we talk about early American history, only four hundred years ago. That's early American history? To a Chinese that's all modern stuff. So, how long is history? What is early? What is late? What is recent? What is modern? What is ancient? You see, it requires a different way of looking at it. And we have to help each other understand this role of history. When I start with you in the history of American education in the 17th century, from the Chinese point of view that is modern. That is practically the last chapter. But from our point of view, that's all that we have until we decide to take our Native American heritage seriously. So we put a lot more emphasis on this compacted period that represents this last four hundred years, these last four centuries.
The beginning of American education was private, predominately religious and when the first public education came about; the Act establishing public schools was called Ye Ole Deluder Satan Act. In Massachusetts they decided that Satan was getting a hold of kids far more than the public liked and that we had to protect kids by sending them to school and help them overcome their ignorance. So, American public schools were founded to protect kids from Satan. Isn't that interesting? That's the reason American public schools are there. The basic skills in the first public education were rooted in religious tradition. This was the starting point.
There are tremendous lessons of history. There are confusing lessons. We must understand that in the United States, we are a plural society. We have lots of different beliefs and the task before us as teachers is how to honor all those beliefs and yet create unity in diversity. It's a hard thing to do. Unfortunately, we have not learned how to do that very well yet. For example, it's one thing to honor a minority belief by not having prayer in school, but it's another thing to have the minority tyrannize the majority when the majority of Americans would prefer to have prayer in schools. I number myself among them. I think there should be prayer in schools. We are a religious nation. But I also think we have a responsibility to find a way to honor the minority view of those who prefer not to have prayer. To have a few people feel so strongly that they deprive the majority is not right. But the majority has the responsibility to honor the opinions of the minority as well.
It's not just a power thing. It's a matter of finding the balance in a pluralistic society. The same is true in sex education. There are many that believe that there should not be sex education in the schools, but there are more that believe that there should be. I believe that there very definitely should be sex education in the schools, if it is properly focused. The very same people who would agree with me that there should be prayer in school are some of the same ones who disagree that sex education should be taught in the schools. We all have different sets of beliefs. Somehow in our society, we must find a way to honor diversity within the limits of the values of the society. Some people who invoke the founding fathers do so only when it's convenient. When it was not convenient, they choose to ignore the founding fathers. We all do that. We are all delightfully inconsistent. But as teachers, the first thing that we need is perspective. We must understand that we are all inconsistent and we must also understand how to struggle with these inconsistencies and to find integrity with a point of view considering those inconsistencies. That is one of the big lessons of history.
In the 17th century, we also had the first American textbook. Up until this point, all of our textbooks were imported from Europe. We did not have enough competence to have our own textbooks. Real knowledge came from the homeland, Europe. It was late in the 17th century that we had our first textbook. That textbook, the New England Primer, became very important. It went for 100 years without revisions. That in itself is a wonderful statistic, because your textbook for this class is the 8th edition; the seventh time it has been revised since it was written by my former students, Jim and Kevin, now about twenty years ago. They have it down to a fine art. Every three years a new edition comes out. The first year after an edition is published, they rest. The second year, they write the new edition and the third year, it is produced and then it is published. They then rest a year and work to revise it a year and then produce it a year and rest again. Think of the difference between that and 100 years without revising a textbook. Can you imagine that? We live in a world changing so fast that if you got a computer last year, its already two generations old and out of date.
In the past, the way the son learned was from his father. The way the daughter learned was from her mother. In this age, anything that your father knows is likely to be outdated. Think of the implication of that for you as a teacher. You are trying to help your kids, as a teacher; live in world that you have not lived in either. That is a very different task than the task of the past. It's a startling thing to see that the New England Primer went for 100 years without revisions and contrast that with the world today, where something just published may already be out of date. We already know that the current edition of the textbook is out of date because there are a lot of things that have happened since this edition was published. Right now there is a big argument in academic circles about something called electronic publishing. There are some journals now that are never printed because they are simply published electronically. You read them on the Internet. That's as far as they ever get. The article is written, reviewed, and put on the net. In some printed journals they are as much as three years behind - articles have been approved and are just waiting for publication. On the Internet there is no limit to the length of the journal. Academic institutions have not yet decided whether electronic publishing counts for real publication for purposes of promotion. Guess what. It will only be about ten years or less before that is a dead argument. These arguments tend to end very quickly. I well remember the argument whether engineers should be permitted to use a calculator when the slide rule was the norm. Now lots of engineers have never used a slide rule and the slide rule is no more than a museum curiosity. All these things are changing ever more quickly.
How do you rectify opposing opinions in education, when they are over highly emotional subjects, which are completely subjective to the values of the diverse holding those opinions?
Now, let's look at the 18th century. During this time, we had our first hints of Standardization. Noah Webster's American spelling book, called the Blue Back Speller, appeared towards the end of the 18th century. I don't know whether to celebrate this as one of the most wonderful things of the history of American education, or as one of the tragedies of history. It is wonderful, because it helped people get organized and become standardized. There are substantial benefits to being standardized. But its pretty tragic the kind of spelling that he left us with - all the double letters and E's scattered at the end of words. English is one of the worse languages in the world in terms of its spelling. It is really lousy. I will never forget memorizing in elementary school: "I before E, except after C, or when it sounded like A, as in neighbor and weigh." All that gets you is the words that have E and I in them. English spelling is miserable. And there is no value added to having difficult spelling. What we really need is phonetic spelling, which would be easier and better for everyone. The problem is we don't know how to get there from here. George Bernard Shaw gave his entire fortune to phonetic spelling.
We have not found a way to be reasonable in terms of our spelling, and the United States is the most backward nation in the world, in terms of our systems of measurement. We still insist that there are 5280 feet in a mile rather than 1000 meters in a kilometer. What benefits are there to have a stupid system of measurement where everything comes out uneven and has to be memorized? It just gives everybody a job to teach and to memorize needless measurements. The metric system is such an obvious system. Everything is 1's, 10's and 100's. All you need to know is that a kilogram is 1000 grams. A kilometer is 1000 meters and a meter is 1000 millimeters. See how much simpler that is?
There are only two nations that have not at least started to adopt the metric system, the U.S. and Burundi. Someone estimated that it costs the world about 5 billion dollars a years just for our foolishness not to be metric. That's because the US is such an important world market, that everybody in the world has to manufacture things like screws to fit our measurement dimensions. But even we do a lot of cheating. Many American carmakers manufacture metric cars now. Often, we impose our will on the rest of the world out of misplaced ignorance. Back in the 1970's, we almost went metric, but then some bureaucrats put up signs and scared the people away. They were trying to persuade the populace to learn the metric system, but they used examples that came out even in our English system of measurement and made it look like everything in the metric system came out uneven. But even now, we live in a world hinting at the metric system when it comes to soft drinks and 2 liter bottles. Where did the 2-liter bottle come from in the midst of pounds, ounces and inches?
As teachers, if we start helping your students understand how pointless it is to have pounds, ounces, and inches rather than a metric system, eventually we will have a world where adults are trained to see the foolishness of our current system. Already, we are starting to join the rest of the world in sports, as soccer becomes more and more popular. The U.S. is the only country where soccer is not one of the major spectator sports. The largest spectator sport here is horse racing, believe it or not.
Review Question:
How does the Blue Back Speller represent the best and the worst effects of
standardization?
Answer:
Standardization helps communication, but the Blue Back Speller standardized for us foolish and complicated ways to spell, from which we are unlikely to recover soon.
In the 18th century, secondary education was private. Even when primary education became public, it was required that every village have a school. It wasn't that each child had to attend; just that each village had to have a school. Religion dominated the schools. That religious tradition was very homogenous. In many ways it was at the same time oppressive and very tolerant. Right now, we have in American education unintended consequences in the relationship between religion and secular education. We are a nation wherein the vast majority of our populous (90%) believe in God; but with the prohibition against teaching religion in public schools, the schools unintentionally teach agnosticism. We tell kids that we are teaching them the important things and we don't teach them anything about religion or spiritualism. So, by default, we are telling them that the spiritual part of our lives is unimportant. I don't think we intend to do that. We have put ourselves in that box sideways. I think it’s very important to honor the pluralistic traditions we have, but certainly the dominant tradition is the Judeo Christian tradition. As an educator, I support the fact that this nation should unabashedly promote its spiritual heritage as well as its secular heritage. How to do that in a way that is not oppressive is a major challenge.
I think you need to learn about history, because it informs the future. This is one of the ways you go to the next steps down the road. More importantly than understanding this for your own use, which in its own right is valuable, is that you are teachers. You as teachers are helping to guide your kids to live in a world that none of us have ever lived in before. That takes a certain style of doing things that is different than if you are merely the conservators of past knowledge, who guard a treasure of knowledge and present it to the next generation. My view is that you are guides to the future. You use available information from whatever source you have to help people study the future so that they can prepare themselves for a world that we can only see uncertainly. This is really what it's all about. The lessons of history become important only if they live. It's so easy for them to become dead, boring and just a list of dates. That's not good at all. We need to find a way to make history live.
The most powerful lessons of history are the ones that give you the unexpected answers. The quiz at the beginning of this lecture is one example. The point of this little quiz is to show you that the answers are not always intuitive or within ourselves. Discovering America was such a big and important task that it must have taken a long time to accomplish it. Wrong? Our intuition does not always work and this is especially important for teachers to know. It is my job to try to make sure there are as few surprises out there as possible and to help you understand why you will be asked to do some of the things you will be asked to do. I think that the way some schools are organized is pretty stupid. Sometimes instead of really thinking things through, we just do them because it comes naturally, which can sometimes turn out pretty awful. As teachers you must help your students understand things that are not so obvious. You must help them see why the preparation that they think they are making is not necessarily going to turn out the way they think it will. This is particularly true for kids, who because of their socio-economic status, really have a hard time seeing 8 to 10 years down the road, that they really can be a part of main line society that includes a well education, financial security, and a part of an intact family. This is one of the biggest jobs of teachers.
The history of education is packed with more information than any of us can know, and I focus on only a few marker events as examples from each of the four centuries we study. The final marker event we will study for the 18th century is the Northwest Ordinance Act, which set aside land for educational use. The politicians, in a true visionary act, decided to give away land for educational purposes. This act probably made the difference between education being something solely for the elite and it becoming available to everybody. As a nation, land was one of our most plentiful resources, which gave us a way of building institutions.
During 19th century, we had the establishment of the First Public High School, and by the end of the century high school education was becoming the new norm. Another important marker of the 19th century was the Teacher Training Schools. It was a new idea to train teachers formally. The training was brief because most teachers were women likely to marry soon and leave the classroom. The purpose of the Teacher Training Schools was to give teachers ideas that they would use in their own way and assert their own individuality. The 19th century was also known for the First Kindergarten. At the start of the century, children were taught just the same as college students. Children were considered "little adults." The idea that children were different from adults was non-existent. How much more we can appreciate our struggles to establish child-centered education and find a balance between the content and method of education, when we realize how recent are the traditions of child education. Until the late nineteenth century all higher education was "liberal arts." There was no such thing as "majors." Everyone took the same basic courses. Land was plentiful and most of the major universities were built back in the woods. The idea was that students needed a quiet, serene, and isolated atmosphere in which to study. Thus, students were sent away to spend time "thinking" full time. Major universities were preoccupied with liberal arts and were reluctant to legitimize the practical research to support the scientific development of agriculture. One of the things that makes our country great is agriculture. Even now, our agricultural exports account for more foreign trade income than any other sector. The establishment of public land grant colleges was another visionary act of the 19th century that created a whole new category of higher education to support practical research. In every state, land was given to establish practical universities. Virginia Tech is a land grant college and its main responsibility is agriculture. Over the last century, land grant universities have grown in the direction of liberal arts and the liberal arts universities have taken on practical work as well. The University Land Grant Act was a strong impetus in making university study practical and led to the development of the broad range of professional graduate degrees that characterize American education today.
The 20th century was the discovery of the Child. Building on the kindergarten, we have been much influenced by a European psychologist, Piaget, whose behavior and development studies became landmarks
Much of what you will study as teachers is child development. You have to be prepared to deal with children at all stages of their development. This is one of the things we have not yet mastered. Now we are discovering the neurology of learning in addition to the psychology of learning.
The First Junior College was established in this century. This is extremely important because it represents a complete change of mind about the nature of higher education. Until the establishment of the junior college, the idea was that you had to go off to the woods to think. And to think properly - to be "higher educated" you had to devote full time to your study. Then someone thought that maybe there ought to be a way for people to get higher education and stay at home. This was a truly revolutionary idea and not readily accepted. The idea that you could pursue a higher education part time was unheard of. Junior colleges allow those that cannot afford a full time scholastic career or who do not have the time due to families or whatever, to complete their course of study at their own pace, often while working full time. This idea is so innovative it still has not been fully accepted. The College of William and Mary, after initiating their own urban campus, decided to discontinue the idea as being too "applied" for their liberal arts reputation and thus Old Dominion University was born. The junior college
ended the idea that higher education was for the rich and that the university was a lofty place somewhere in the woods where elite and wealthy students went off to think.
The twentieth century also saw the inception of the funding of education for the poor. Scholarships for higher education were a product of the New Deal in American politics. The idea of education for the poor was not only necessary, but was also revolutionary. Changes in education began to occur at an exponential rate in the twentieth century. In the 17th century no one would have ever thought of providing education for the poor. But as society progresses, more education became essential for people to contribute as productive members of society. Luckily we have relatively quickly recognized that and have made many necessary changes in our institutions as well as in our thinking. Although, we still find it hard to keep up with the changes we confront. Even as we can be legitimately very critical of the status of current educational practice and cry out for reform, we must give credit to the enormous changes which have taken place and the preeminent role that the United States has played in the development of universal education and the transformation of higher education.
More major advances in education took place after World War Two. The first of which was the GI Bill. After the fall of the Axis powers, the United States was flooded with young men (soldiers) to whom we felt we owed a great debt. There was a big problem: What do we do with the hundreds of thousands of men returning home? So brilliant plans were developed to send them to school. This was very important. Most of the men returning home were not from the upper echelons of society, they were from middle and lower class families and the GI Bill provided them with unprecedented access to higher education. To handle the massive influx of students, hundreds of colleges were built and the capacity of higher education was permanently enlarged. The GI Bill put to final rest the notion that higher education was for the privileged.
Another innovation in education came about as a result of the cold war. With the launch of Sputnik and the ensuing hysteria in the United States, people believed the United States to be twenty years behind the Russians in Science education. The National Defense Education Act was enacted to improve the sciences and guard America's future. In all actuality, the United States was not behind; in fact we could have put a satellite up before Sputnik, but were busy putting all the bells and whistles on our Explorer satellite. In any event, it became politically expedient to pass such education legislation and so science education was the beneficiary of good legislation for the wrong reason. Good things often occur for the wrong reasons.
The Job Corps is another landmark in American education. The advent of Job Corps initiated the notion that we value those who do not do well in traditional education. Previously, it was considered a great leap forward just to give students a chance at school and if they did well then great, but if not then tough luck, they had their shot and blew it. No one recognized that many talents other than those cultivated in traditional schools (with the exception of athletics) are important. The Job Corps, which gave those less than successful in school, another chance, was the first step toward this new philosophy of education (traditional and non-traditional) for all. The next step was alternative education.
Alternative education means all kinds of alternatives to traditional education. We are still working on this one. We must find a way to honor and make use of all the talent that members of society have to offer. Great strides in this movement have been made by Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences.
Federal aid to public schools marks the first real involvement of the federal government with lower education. The idea that the federal government get involved with lower education is a new one and one that I feel is a very important step toward achieving some type of national standard. The Federal Act, PL 94-142, mandated that additional resources be provided for education of special students. Special education is only about two decades old and an important one.
The idea of legislated quality is also a marker in the history of American education. State legislatures have been passing laws for the last decade mandating higher standards in a variety of ways. While not an effective approach in my opinion, legislated quality, literacy passport tests, and teacher accountability, for example, are steps toward a desirable and needed national standard. Unfortunately, most legislated quality in education doesn't provide the resources to achieve the goals, about which there is little disagreement. As the context of education changes, as the complexities increase, as the goals are enhanced, we need to know more. We need more experimentation, we need more resources, and we need more perspective. Legislated quality represents the public's frustration with and their feelings of isolation from the schools. We need to do much better in encouraging parents and community involvement, and we need to be willing to change.
The idea of endless reform is the last milepost in education history that we will consider. The idea that teachers must be trained and retrained throughout their careers is new. The New England Primer went 100 hundred years without revision. Now teachers can't afford to go two years without some type of supplemental training. We'll talk lots more about educational reform. It won't be over soon. And we won't be truly successful until we accept the fact that in a world of change that schools and school practices will be constantly evolving. We need a whole new approach that makes change our friend, not an enemy to be overcome. Finally we should remember why we study the history of education: to help us study its future. It is awfully hard to know where we are going when we don't know where we have been. As teachers it is our job to help our students study the future -theirs and ours.