.3 17th Century American Education

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. Its 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 its 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 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, whenthey are over highly emotional subjects, which are completely subjective to the values of the diverse holding those opinions?

	How do you rectify opposing oppinions in education when they are over highly emotional subjects which are completely subjective to the values of the diverse holding those opinions?	Answer Here
	Mr. Wilson is a seventeenth-century teacher. What philosophy would he most likely follow and how many students would he most likely have?	Answer Here