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'Schools are not as old as mountains or rivers'. Then how old are they?

Snippets:

- The below snippets have been prepared by Peter Gray's year 2008's article 'A brief history of education'. In this article he discusses about how schools were discovered.

- Children now are almost universally identified by their grade in school, much as adults are identified by their job or career.

- If we want to understand why standard schools are what they are, we have to abandon the idea that they are products of logical necessity or scientific insight. 

- The human instincts (its natural) to play and explore are so powerful that they can never be fully beaten out of a child. 

- In relation to the biological history of our species, schools are very recent institutions. 

- When society became steeply hierarchical, with a few kings and lords at the top and masses of slaves and serfs at the bottom. Now the lot of most people, children included, was servitude. The principal lessons that children had to learn were obedience, suppression of their own will, and the show of reverence toward lords and masters. 

- For several thousand years after the advent of agriculture, the education of children was, to a considerable degree, a matter squashing their willfulness in order to make them good laborers. A good child was an obedient child, who suppressed his or her urge to play and explore and dutifully carried out the orders of adult masters. 

- As industry progressed and became somewhat more automated, the need for child labor declined in some parts of the world. The idea began to spread that childhood should be a time for learning, and schools for children were developed as places of learning.

- Power-assertive methods that had been used to make children work in fields and factories were quite naturally transferred to the classroom.

- Compulsory public education developed gradually in Europe, from the early 16th century on into the 19th. It was an idea that had many supporters, who all had their own agendas concerning the lessons that children should learn.

- Punishments of all sorts were understood as intrinsic to the educational process. Play was the enemy of learning.

- Some of the underpaid, ill-prepared schoolmasters were clearly sadistic.

- Employers in industry saw schooling as a way to create better workers.

- All of them saw schooling as inculcation, the implanting of certain truths and ways of thinking into children's minds. The only known method of inculcation, then as well as now, is forced repetition and testing for memory what was repeated.

- Children whose drive to play is so strong that they can't sit still for lessons are no longer beaten; instead, they are medicated.

Click to read the critical analysis and linkages by Peter Gray:

The Credence Learning Foundation blog is an initiative of CLF to bring news and views on education from various sources.

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