11/17/2023 0 Comments Evolution of education infographic![]() In this posting I have tried to explain how the history of humanity has led to the development of schools as we know them today. Children now are almost universally identified by their grade in school, much as adults are identified by their job or career. Over time, children's lives have become increasingly defined and structured by the school curriculum. ![]() Just as adults put in their eight-hour day at their place of employment, children today put in their six-hour day at school, plus another hour or more of homework, and often more hours of lessons outside of school. School gradually replaced fieldwork, factory work, and domestic chores as the child's primary job. The methods of discipline became more humane, or at least less corporal the lessons became more secular the curriculum expanded, as knowledge expanded, to include an ever-growing list of subjects and the number of hours, days, and years of compulsory schooling increased continuously. In the 19th and 20th centuries, public schooling gradually evolved toward what we all recognize today as conventional schooling. Learning continues to be defined as children's work, and power-assertive means are used to make children do that work. In recent times, the methods of schooling have become less harsh, but basic assumptions have not changed. In the classroom, play was the enemy of learning. In some schools children were permitted certain periods of play (recess), to allow them to let off steam but play was not considered to be a vehicle of learning. Punishments of all sorts were understood as intrinsic to the educational process. Everyone assumed that to make children learn in school the children's willfulness would have to be beaten out of them. By this point in history, the idea that children's own willfulness had any value was pretty well forgotten. This was no surprise to the adults involved. Just as children did not adapt readily to laboring in fields and factories, they did not adapt readily to schooling. Repetition and memorization of lessons is tedious work for children, whose instincts urge them constantly to play freely and explore the world on their own. The same power- assertive methods that had been used to make children work in fields and factories were quite naturally transferred to the classroom. With the rise of schooling, people began to think of learning as children's work. In 1883, for example, new legislation forbade textile manufacturers from employing children under the age of 9 and limited the maximum weekly work hours to 48 for 10- to 12-year-olds and to 69 for 13- to 17-year-olds. Not until the 19th century did England pass laws limiting child labor. Many thousands of them died each year of diseases, starvation, and exhaustion. In England, overseers of the poor commonly farmed out paupers' children to factories, where they were treated as slaves. The labor of children was moved from fields, where there had at least been sunshine, fresh air, and some opportunities to play, into dark, crowded, dirty factories. People, including young children, worked most of their waking hours, seven days a week, in beastly conditions, just to survive. Everyone knows of the exploitation that followed and still exists in many parts of the world. Business owners, like landowners, needed laborers and could profit by extracting as much work from them as possible with as little compensation as possible. With the rise of industry and of a new bourgeoisie class, feudalism gradually subsided, but this did not immediately improve the lives of most children. Anthropologists have reported that the hunter-gatherer groups they studied did not distinguish between work and play-essentially all of life was understood as play. However, they did not have to work long hours and the work they did was exciting, not dreary. They had to be able to take initiative and be creative in finding foods and tracking game. They also had to develop great skill in crafting and using the tools of hunting and gathering. To be effective hunters and gatherers, people had to acquire a vast knowledge of the plants and animals on which they depended and of the landscapes within which they foraged. The hunter-gatherer way of life had been skill-intensive and knowledge-intensive, but not labor-intensive. The invention of agriculture, beginning 10,000 years ago in some parts of the world and later in other parts, set in motion a whirlwind of change in people's ways of living. Willfulness, which had been a virtue, became a vice that had to be beaten out of children. With the rise of agriculture, and later of industry, children became forced laborers.
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