Early Civilizations
Because firsthand experience in everyday living could not teach such skills as writing and reading, a place devoted exclusively to learning--the school--appeared. And with the school appeared a group of adults specially designated as teachers--the scribes of the court and the priests of the temple. The children were either in the vast majority who continued to learn exclusively by an informal apprenticeship or the tiny minority who received formal schooling.
The method of learning was memorization, and the motivation was the fear of harsh physical discipline. On an ancient Egyptian clay tablet discovered by archaeologists, a child had written: "Thou didst beat me and knowledge entered my head."
Of the ancient peoples of the Middle East, the Jews were the most insistent that all children--regardless of class--be educated. In the 1st century AD, the historian Flavius Josephus wrote: "We take most pains of all with the instruction of the children and esteem the observance of the laws and the piety corresponding with them the most important affair of our whole life." The Jews established elementary schools where boys from about 6 to 13 years of age probably learned rudimentary mathematics and certainly learned reading and writing. The main concern was the study of the first five books of the Old Testament--the Pentateuch--and the precepts of the oral tradition that had grown up around them. At age 13, brighter boys could continue their studies as disciples of a rabbi, the "master" or "teacher." So vital was the concept of instruction for the Jews that the synagogues existed at least as much for education as for worship.
Ancient Greece
The Greek gods were much more down-to-earth and much less awesome than the remote gods of the East. Because they were endowed with human qualities and often represented aspects of the physical world--such as the sun, the moon, and the sea--they were closer to man and to the world he lived in. The Greeks, therefore, could find spiritual satisfaction in the ordinary, everyday world. They could develop a secular life free from the domination of a priesthood that exacted homage to gods remote from everyday life. The goal of education in the Greek city-states was to prepare the child for adult activities as a citizen. The nature of the city-states varied greatly, and this was also true of the education they considered appropriate. The goal of education in Sparta, an authoritarian, military city-state, was to produce soldier-citizens. On the other hand, the goal of education in Athens, a democratic city-state, was to produce citizens trained in the arts of both peace and war.
Ancient Rome
The military conquest of Greece by Rome in 146 BC resulted in the cultural conquest of Rome by Greece. As the Roman poet Horace said, "Captive Greece took captive her rude conqueror and brought the arts to Latium." Actually, Greek influence on Roman education had begun about a century before the conquest. Originally, most if not all of the Roman boy's education took place at home. If the father himself were educated, the boy would learn to read and would learn Roman law, history, and customs. The father also saw to his son's physical training. When the boy was older, he sometimes prepared himself for public life by a kind of apprenticeship to one of the orators of the time. He thus learned the arts of oratory firsthand by listening to the debates in the Senate and in the public forum. The element introduced into Roman education by the Greeks was book learning.
The Middle Ages
The invading Germanic tribes that moved into the civilized world of the West and all but destroyed ancient culture provided virtually no formal education for their young. In the early Middle Ages the elaborate Roman school system had disappeared. Mankind in 5th-century Europe might well have reverted almost to the level of primitive education had it not been for the medieval church, which preserved what little Western learning had survived the collapse of the Roman Empire. In the drafty, inhospitable corridors of church schools, the lamp of learning continued to burn low, though it flickered badly.
The Renaissance
The essence of the Renaissance, which began in Italy in the 14th century and spread to northern European countries in the 15th and 16th centuries, was a revolt against the narrowness and otherworldliness of the Middle Ages. For inspiration the early Renaissance humanists turned to the ideals expressed in the literature of ancient Greece. Like the Greeks, they wanted education to develop man's intellectual, spiritual, and physical powers for the enrichment of life.
The Reformation
The degeneration in practice of the early humanists' educational goals and methods continued during the 16th-century Reformation and its aftermath. The religious conflict that dominated men's thoughts also dominated the "humanistic" curriculum of the Protestant secondary schools. The Protestants' need to defend their new religion resulted in the further sacrifice of "pagan" content and more emphasis on drill in the mechanics of the Greek and Latin languages. In actual practice, then, the humanistic ideal deteriorated into the narrowness and otherworldliness that the original humanists had opposed.
17th- and 18th-Century Europe
The vast majority of schools remained in a state of stagnation during the 17th and 18th centuries. By and large, the teachers were incompetent and the discipline cruel. The learning methods were drill and memorization of words, sentences, and facts that the children often did not understand. Most members of the lower classes got no schooling whatsoever, and what some did get was at the hands of teachers who often were themselves barely educated.
The 17th century. One of the educational pioneers of great stature was John (Johann) Amos Comenius (1592-1670). Effective education, Comenius insisted, must take into account the nature of the child. His own observations of children led him to the conclusion that they were not miniature adults. He characterized the schools, which treated them as if they were, as "the slaughterhouses of minds" and "places where minds are fed on words." Comenius believed that understanding comes "not in the mere learning the names of things, but in the actual perception of the things themselves." Education should begin, therefore, with the child's observation of actual objects or, if not the objects themselves, models or pictures of them. The practical result of this theory was Comenius' 'Orbis Pictus' (The World in Pictures), the first--and for a long time the only--textbook in the Western world that had illustrations for children to look at. Although the ideas on which it was based were at first ridiculed, Comenius' book was widely used by children for about 200 years.
The 18th century. It was the delayed shock waves of the ideas of an 18th-century Frenchman that were to crack the foundations of education in the 20th century and cause their virtual upheaval in the United States. The man was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78). The child, as Rousseau saw him, unfolds or develops--intellectually, physically, and emotionally--much like a plant.
Colonial America
While the schools that the colonists established in the 17th century in the New England, Southern, and Middle colonies differed from one another, each reflected a concept of schooling that had been left behind in Europe. Most poor children learned through apprenticeship and had no formal schooling at all. Those who did go to elementary school were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. Learning consisted of memorizing, which was stimulated by whipping. The secondary school, attended by the wealthier children, was, as in most of Europe, the Latin grammar school. The teachers were no better prepared, and perhaps less so, than the teachers in Europe.
It is not surprising, at about this time, when the goal of education was to expedite the transfer of information to a large number of students, that the normal schools began to fall under the influence of Herbart. The essence of his influence probably lay not so much in his carefully evolved five-step lesson plan but in the basic idea of a lesson plan. Such a plan suggested the possibility of evolving a systematic method of instruction that was the same for all pupils. Perhaps Herbart's emphasis on the importance of motivating pupils to learn--whether through presentation of the material or, failing that, through rewards and punishments--also influenced the new teaching methods of the 1880s and 1890s.
The new methods, combined with the physical organization of the school, represented the antithesis of Pestalozzi's belief that the child's innate powers should be allowed to unfold naturally. Rather, the child must be lopped off or stretched to fit the procrustean curriculum bed. Subjects were graded according to difficulty, assigned to certain years, and taught by a rigid daily timetable. The amount of information that the child had absorbed through drill and memorization was determined by how much could be extracted from him by examinations. Reward or punishment came in the form of grades.
At the end of the 19th century the methods of presenting information had thus been streamlined. The curriculum had been enlarged and brought closer to the concerns of everyday life. Book learning had been supplemented somewhat by direct observation. And psychological flogging in the form of grades had perhaps diminished the amount of physical flogging. In one respect, however, the schools of the late 19th century were no different from those, say, of the Middle Ages: they were still based on what adults thought children were or should be, not what they really were.
No comments:
Post a Comment