Recently I’ve been thinking more and more about formal education, it’s playing on my mind a ridiculous amount.
I keep thinking about how education has been inherently wrong since formal education began. How it was designed by adults who gave no thought to how children thrive, how they experience the world. I have made mind maps to formulate my thoughts but found an article today which was amazing, it was as though someone had entered my thoughts, rearranged them and put them in an articulate manner.
This is the quote, at the start, which grabbed my attention. It explains why formal education wasn’t created to help children learn as children.
“At the turn of the twentieth century educational theorists were quite open about the fact that they were designing schools for the purpose of adapting children to the new industrial order. Children must shed their “savage” wildness, these pedagogues maintained, and develop “civilized” habits like punctuality, obedience, orderliness, and efficiency. As Ellwood P. Cubberley, Dean of the Stanford University School of Education, put it in 1898:
Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw materials – children – are to be shaped and fashioned into products… The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of 20th century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.”
It’s a very long article but, if you’re of this mindset, it’s a very interesting read.
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