Steemhomework for the week!/History of Education and the school
A brief history of education and school.
When we see that children all over the world are bound by law to go to school, that almost all schools are structured in the same way and that our society undertakes a great effort and resources to maintain these places, we naturally believe that it should There is some logical reason for all that. Maybe, if we did not force children to go to school or, maybe, if schools operated in another way, children would not grow up and become competent adults. Perhaps, some very intelligent people have thought about all this and, therefore, have to be like that, or maybe other ways of imagining the development of children and their education were tried and failed.
"The common children learn on their own, from their explorations and games, without intrusion direction of an adult"
If we want to understand why the school is what it is, we have to abandon the idea that it is the product of a logical and scientific necessity. It is, on the contrary, the product of history. School, as we have today, only makes sense within its historicity.
And as a first step to explain why this is so, I present a summary, a drawing of the history of education of the beginning of humanity until today. The great part of the academics of the history of education use words different from those I have chosen, but I doubt that I deny the precision of what I have drawn. Actually, I have used texts from these scholars to develop this draft.
For various reasons, along with the advance of civilization and cultural changes, the idea of universal and compulsory education emerged. It gradually expanded as the automation of the industry developed, originating the creation of schools as places of learning. This idea was expanding in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, together with the emergence of public and compulsory education.
Education was seen as instruction, as the vehicle to impose certain truths, ways of thinking and acting. The method of instruction was forced repetition and checking to remember, which has been repeated. Repeating and memorizing lessons is a tedious job for boys and girls, their instincts constantly lead them to want to play freely and explore the world on their own.
Playing is a natural learning
In comparison with the biological history of our species, schools are very new institutions. For hundreds of thousands of years, before the arrival of agriculture, we lived as collector hunters. In a text, I gathered the evidence from anthropology that shows that, in hunter-gatherer cultures, children learn what they need to become adults based on their own ability to play and explore. The strong impulses of the child to undertake these activities arose during our evolution, to serve the purpose of education. Adults, in hunting societies and collectors, grant almost unlimited freedom for children to play on their own, because they recognize that these activities consist of the most natural way to learn.
School, as we have today, only makes sense within its historicity.
With the invention of agriculture, beginning around 10 thousand years ago in some parts of the world, a swirl of change in the way of life of people was set in motion. The hunter-gatherer mode demanded enormous skills and knowledge. But it was not a workable way of living. To be efficient, people had to acquire a vast knowledge of plants and animals, landscapes and local geography. They also had to be skilled artisans of their tools, have initiative and be creative in the ways of finding food and hunting. However, they did not have long work hours - and their work was exciting, not monotonous.
Anthropologists describe that hunter-gatherers did not make distinctions between work and play - essentially, all life was understood in a playful way.
Child labor and the Death of The Games
With the emergence of agriculture and animal husbandry, work also emerges.
Agriculture gradually changed this scenario. With it, people could produce more food, which allowed the survival of more children. She also allowed (or forced) people to settle in the places where their crops were planted, instead of living a nomadic life, and that, in turn, allowed people to accumulate property. These changes caused a very large increase in workloads. While hunter-gatherers skillfully harvested what nature cultivated, farmers had to plow, plant, cultivate and care for their herds. Having successful harvests required long hours of relatively simple work, which could be done by children. With growing families, the children had to work in the fields to help feed their younger siblings, or they had to work at home to help and care for the siblings while the parents worked. Children's lives began to change gradually from the free search of their own interests to, increasingly, spend more time in the work necessary to maintain and serve the rest of the family.
The school today.
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It is a space where children learn the unnatural distinction between work and play. The teachers say, "you must finish your work and there you can play". Clearly, according to that message, work, which encompasses all school learning, is something that you do not want to do, but we do it because you owe it; and the game that is all that the person wants to do, does not have much value. This, perhaps, is the fundamental lesson of our method of schooling. Even if the child does not learn anything at school, he will know the difference between playing and working. In that, learning will always be work, not play.
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Thanks for sharing the good relationship between work and play, they never did it in their place, because they did it because they adapted to a comfortable and easy to use situation so that they do not do homework and run out of games.
Teachers do not take breaks from their students, nothing is accomplished, students are less interested in carrying out activities.