.4 18th Century American Education

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 I and E 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 its 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.

	Why is it important for teachers to understand history?	Answer Here
	Mrs. Speight is a sixth-grade language arts instructor at Churchland Jr. High School. How would the hints of standardization that became evident in the eighteenth century affect the way that Mrs. Speight teaches language arts today?	Answer Here