Forward to the Past ... Another School Year Begins

Here's just a little something for you to ponder as you put little Oliver Jr. or Olivia on the bus for his or her first day back at the books:


Schools, along with prisons, insane asylums and hospitals were an 18th century invention. The school, as it was originally established, was not in the least concerned with making sure an individual learner's needs were met. Like its sister institutions, the first schools were a place of rigid control and management. They were inflexible, impersonal and, according to their designers, infallible. They were a far cry from today's educational settings.


I recently heard a colleague suggest that we should get back to the original intent of schools; we need to focus more on individual learning instead of teaching to 'the middle,' or average student while ignoring the higher and lower ends of the classroom's human spectrum. I don't know exactly how the belief arose that schools were originally anything other than places of imposed, coerced discipline.


Essentially, schools were meant to get the urchins, hereafter referred to in the singular as 'Oliver,' off of the street and into a place where they could be hammered into shape as useful members of society. Back then, this meant that Oliver was to sit in his assigned seat at the assigned times and do his assigned work. If he didn't excel at his learning, he was to be a laborer or other menial worker. And, if he refused to learn or had other issues, he would make his way into the asylum or prison. In any event, poor little Oliver wouldn't be harassing people on the streets or cleaning out their apartments while they were away at work in another burgeoning institution: the factory.


Yes, the school was then a place to keep Oliver, a child of factory workers, out of trouble while at the same time teaching him whatever discipline and knowledge was needed to take his parents' places or the places of others more suitable to his educational successes—or, lack thereof. The school was another industrial-era institution that grew from the social reorganization of the state and the primary means of wealth production. Emerging nations needed to devise the infrastructural components to gather, contain and control segments of the population that didn't fit directly into the new scheme of things. The school was one such place.


What's my point? Well, the colleague I mentioned earlier made the comment in regards to improving student learning. Unfortunately, all of the would-be revolutions and innovations in contemporary education are rendered moot because of the very nature of the school itself. Until this basic unit of the system is fundamentally changed, there will be no widespread, lasting improvement in how we teach and how children learn. As long as we group students chronologically, arrange the timeline into semesters or years and artificially segment the school day, make all children learn the same things regardless of their interests and aptitudes and, finally, use standardized testing to measure their progress, the results will never change. Nor will the fate of poor little Oliver's great-great-great-great grandchildren—give or take a generation or two.