History of Education

9/16/15

 

After reading an overview on the history of education - from ancient Greece to near present day, I’ve found several things that completely took me off guard.

The first piece of information that I didn’t expect came from the system in Ancient Greece. I learned that females and slaves were not allowed to attend school, which wasn’t in itself surprising, but they could receive tutoring for the purpose of home-schooling the young children under their care. It’s extremely difficult to imagine that a society that holds debates in such high regard would maintain a system that seemingly acknowledges a woman’s ability to not only learn but also teach the same concepts as anyone else, yet denies them the rights to education. The denial of education makes sense when you’re talking about human slavery because information is power - and obviously these societies do not want their slaves to have power. Despite this, I can’t help but wonder how it was decided what was taught to women and slaves and what was restricted. Were they only allowed to learn basic concepts? Could they be educated to the same extent that a 5 year old would for example, but no further?  This is definitely a topic I would like to explore more, but my initial research is producing a lot of conflicting information. For now I’ll move on to the next topic.

The second fact, or maybe person, that surprised me most was Thomas Jefferson. I had no prior knowledge of his role on the shift of the school curriculum away from bibles, church theology, latin and greek, into more traditional academics such as science and math. There is a very persistent patriotic myth that America was “founded as a Christian country” and I often see posts on Facebook and other websites claiming that the government is extracting God from schools, and that their child should be allowed to pray because this was America.

So I was very surprised to learn, having only been exposed to the ‘patriotic’ idea put forth in Facebook memes and chain e-mails, that one of the founding fathers played a major role in shifting school curriculums away from religion.

Not only that, but Jefferson also believed that democracy works when all people have access to the same education. Since he believed that all people had the same potential for acquiring knowledge, making schooling accessible to everyone would create an educated population where representatives could be appointed (since everyone is, supposedly, of similar intellect) to run the country.

To me this means that our basic educational functions in America are flawed because the availability of quality education varies so greatly based on region, income class, race, and so many other factors. We are not providing equal education to all American citizens, whether it be students who are too poor to go to college or even urban schools that don’t get the funding they need. Students may have access to a paper that says they’ve completed high school, but even that does not necessarily mean education. According to a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education and National Institute of Literacy that I found inline,19% of high school graduates graduate without the ability read.

With this new knowledge that at least one of our founding fathers drafted the constitution based on the idea that our country would provide it’s citizens with equal educational opportunities makes me realize what a critical role education is playing in the growth or decay of our country.  And it absolutely makes sense. For democracy to work the way it intended, there needs to be an educated and informed population.  

The most shocking thing of all was the realization that from Ancient Greece through to today, we still are not providing education equally to everybody. I haven’t found my answer yet as to exactly what the viewpoint was in Ancient Greece, but it is clear that for Modern America we’ve known quite literally since the beginning that one major component to a working and functioning society and government is equal access to education. We can look back at Ancient Greece and talk about how awful it was for them to deny education to a specific ‘lower’ class of people - but I’d hope that doing so would result in us looking at present day selves and recognizing that we are committing the same terrible act, only under different circumstances.