Schools are products of history
By: Irina Nikolovska
Tags: Learning, Edtech, Education, Education Reform, History Of Education

The current education system is failing us. It has become the hustle for grades and credentials instead of helping us grow as individuals in an environment that fuels creativity and innovation.

Aren’t schools products of logical necessity and scientific insight, meant to shape a better future for society? No they’re not. Schools are products of history.

The history of education

Let’s take a look at our ancestors the hunter-gatherers. They lived a very different life to what we know today. And contrary to us, they had more important things to think about than creating institutionalised schools.

While adults went hunting and looking for food, kids were left to educate themselves through self-directed play, exploration and observation. Anthropological evidence suggests that our strong drive as kids to play and explore presumably came about during our evolution as hunter-gatherers.

Parents during those times allowed their kids almost unlimited freedom to play and explore on their own because they recognised that those activities are children’s natural ways of learning.

So what happened next?

Agriculture!

Agriculture was both a salvation and a curse for humankind. When people started to control how plants grow, it allowed them to produce more food, they were able to have a higher standard of living, have more children and have permanent homes rather than moving around in search of resources.

This all sounds great, but like every technology, there’s a downside: farmers had to cultivate their lands and spend long tedious hours in repetitive labor. Farming doesn’t require a complex skillset either, so large families made use of their children and had them work in the fields or fend for their younger siblings.

Agriculture brought privilege on the table. The more land you owned gave you a distinct status in society, and people that didn’t own land became dependent on those who did.

A major shift in dynamic happened when landowners discovered that they could increase their own wealth by getting other people to work for them. And so systems of slavery and other forms of servitude were developed.

One thing we know for sure is that work is a serious thing, so play and exploration became more suppressed and wilfulness turned into an unaccepted trait.

With the rise of feudalism in the Middle Ages, society became steeply hierarchical. The main lessons kids had to learn during those times were obedience, suppression of their own will and deep respect towards nobility. Any rebellious spirit resulted mostly in death.

With the rise of a new bourgeoisie class, feudalism gradually subsided, but it didn’t necessarily improve the lives of children. Business owners still needed labourers and were constantly thinking of ways to extract as much work for as little compensation as possible.

Sounds familiar?

Well, eventually, the labor of children was moved from fields to dark, crowded factories.

Why was school created?

Schools have existed at least since ancient China, Greece, Rome and India. They were created to teach people basic literacy and hard skills, so they can perform better in the workforce and understand religious scripture.

For thousand years after the rise of agriculture, education was mostly there to prepare children to become good labourers. A good child was an obedient child who substituted playing and exploring with disciplined manual work.

The more we developed our civilisations and created modern agriculture and later industry, parents needed to make sure their kids were able to fit into those modern societies and become labourers.

But as the industries progressed and were becoming more automated, the need for child labor began to decline, at least in some parts of the world. So the idea that children should use their young years for learning emerged.

Soon enough employers from different corporate industries saw the school system as a way to create better workers. The industrial revolution influenced the education system immensely and pressured the following crucial lessons to be implemented: punctuality, following directions, tolerance for long hours of tedious work and a minimal ability to read and write.

The objective was definitely not to develop the next generation of brilliant minds, but more to have a functioning, dull society that does as they are told.

Nations on the other hand saw the opportunity to maintain patriotism and a sense of obligation towards the country of origin, especially the necessity to defend the nation from evil forces. Perfect recipe for obedient soldiers.

Everyone involved in the development of the education system had an agenda of what children should learn and in which direction they should develop. Nobody really believed that if you leave kids on their own they would actually learn what is important. So we spent centuries deciding what truths to tell kids and how to silence their wilfulness until a point where it was understood that wilfulness was actually a required trait. Educators turned to harshness and punishment as means to extract wilfulness and regarded play as the enemy of learning.

Luckily for our generations, we live in times where school has become less rigorous. But we are still stuck in a system that dates back to the industrial revolution. We can’t progress if we continue to accept that structure as the status quo.

It’s time to challenge it, to create a better system.

How?

I’ll tell you more about our thoughts in the next article. 😊

📹 You can also join us on the 21st of Dec at 5pm CET on our YouTube Channel where we’ll share what we’ve been working on and invite you to become one of our first explorers to test try the first prototype of The Journey.

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