Education

History Fix Podcast
Aug 23
25 min read

Episode 127: Why Our Failing Education System Has Missed the Mark for 12,000 Years

Dorothy Ann Bell in front of her one room school house in northern Wisconsin, where she was teaching in 1920

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Walk into any classroom anywhere in the world today and it will look pretty much the same. The students may look different. They may be speaking different languages. There will be slight variations but the overall set up is the same. Education, schooling, is an almost universally shared experience for most humans today. Most of us spent years of our lives in classrooms and if you were to reminisce on it now, to share a story from your school days with someone from a different place, a different time even, someone who didn’t go to school with you, they would get it. They would near fully understand the context of your story because their own school experience was so very similar. But did you know that almost universal experience - school - is actually a very recent development? For the vast majority of human history the education of children looked very very different. And while the free public education of today sounds like a great thing, there’s a chance, a slowly materializing realization, that we may just be doing it all wrong. Let’s fix that.

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. As most of you know, I am very deeply involved in the world of education. It means a whole lot to me. I taught elementary school for 8 years and now I work as a curriculum developer creating lesson materials for other teachers. I’m very interested in the ways that children learn and it is truly my life’s mission to maximize the potential for schools to do right by children. But, as someone who’s worked in schools, I’m also acutely aware of the almost insurmountable challenges keeping that from happening. It is, in many ways, a failing system. But it’s also a very new system. Compulsory public education as we know it has only been around for about the last 200 years. It reminds me of what they say about democracy, right? That democracy can only last around 200 years before it inevitably fails. Specifically, side note, that idea was put forth by a Scottish professor of history and Greek and Roman antiquities named Alexander Fraser Tytler back in the 1780s when America was emerging as a nation. He never actually said 200 years, he said that democracy is always temporary in nature and cannot exist as a permanent form of government. But, anyway I feel like we’re getting there with the education system, and probably also with democracy to be honest but that’s a whole nother episode. a

To understand how we got where we are today with education, where every classroom is essentially a carbon copy of the next and every child is forced into the same template despite varied learning needs, we have to look, of course, at the history. I’m drawing heavily in this episode from an article written by psychologist Peter Gray, a retired professor at Boston College who still works as a research professor. The full article is, of course, linked in the description and I highly recommend giving it a read. Gray writes quote “If we want to understand why standard schools are what they are, we need to abandon the idea that they are products of logical necessity or scientific insight. They are, instead, products of history. Schooling, as it exists today, only makes sense if we view it from a historical perspective,” end quote. So let’s get into that history. Let’s go all the way back to the earliest humans, our hunter-gatherer ancestors, who dominated almost the entirety of the human timeline from the emergence of modern humans around maybe 300,000 years ago (but who really knows) until the advent of agriculture roughly 12,000 years ago. That’s around 96% of the timeline, this is who we were, hunter gatherers. Gray writes of this time quote “In relation to the biological history of our species, schools are very recent institutions. For hundreds of thousands of years, before the advent of agriculture, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Elsewhere I have summarized the evidence from anthropology that children in hunter-gatherer cultures learned what they needed to know to become effective adults through their own play and exploration (Gray, 2012). The strong drives in children to play and explore presumably came about, during our evolution as hunter-gatherers, to serve the needs of education. Adults in hunter-gatherer cultures allowed children almost unlimited freedom to play and explore on their own because they recognized that those activities are children's natural ways of learning,” end quote. So there’s no schooling going on. There’s no formal education of any kind. The kids are just free to play and do as they please. Was child mortality high? Yeah. Studies suggest that about half of hunter-gatherer children did not survive to adulthood. But this was mostly due to a complete lack of healthcare and various nutritional deficiencies, not the play based learning that was taking place. Overall the hunter gatherer lifestyle was fulfilling. Gray says quote “The hunter-gatherer way of life had been skill-intensive and knowledge-intensive, but not labor-intensive. To be effective hunters and gatherers, people had to acquire a vast knowledge of the plants and animals on which they depended and of the landscapes within which they foraged. They also had to develop great skill in crafting and using the tools of hunting and gathering. They had to be able to take initiative and be creative in finding foods and tracking game. However, they did not have to work long hours; and the work they did was exciting, not dreary. Anthropologists have reported that the hunter-gatherer groups they studied did not distinguish between work and play—essentially all of life was understood as play,” end quote. And so it makes sense that natural, child-led play based education was encouraged and allowed. They were, by nature, training themselves for life as adults.

Then we see a major shift happen with the onset of the agricultural revolution that happened around 12,000 years ago. Gray writes quote “Agriculture gradually changed all that. With agriculture, people could produce more food, which allowed them to have more children. Agriculture also allowed people (or forced people) to live in permanent dwellings, where their crops were planted, rather than live a nomadic life, and this in turn allowed people to accumulate property. But these changes occurred at a great cost in labor. While hunter-gatherers skillfully harvested what nature had grown, farmers had to plow, plant, cultivate, tend their flocks, and so on. Successful farming required long hours of relatively unskilled, repetitive labor, much of which could be done by children. With larger families, children had to work in the fields to help feed their younger siblings, or they had to work at home to help care for those siblings. Children's lives changed gradually from the free pursuit of their own interests to increasingly more time spent at work that was required to serve the rest of the family,” end quote.

The onset of agriculture also caused something else significant. It led to the ownership of land. Right, this was a new concept. And this was part of the problem that we see, for example, with the European colonization of the Americas much later. The Europeans had this concept of land ownership that the indigenous Americans did not have to the same degree. Yes they planted crops and whatnot but they also still very much led a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and they viewed land ownership much differently. So this was something that developed in much of the world because of the agricultural revolution. People are owning land and accumulating property which had value and this led to differences in class, a social hierarchy based on land ownership. So what that meant was, people who did not own land were forced to depend on those who did. If you don’t have anywhere to plant and grow crops to eat, you better know someone who does and you better go work his land in hopes that he’ll feed you too in return. Otherwise how are you going to eat? Hunter gatherer days are gone. You’re farming or you’re starving. And so what happens is, these wealthy land owners realize that the more people they can get to come work on their land, the greater profit they can make and the wealthier they can become. And so now we see the emergence of slavery and other forms of servitude where non land owners are forced to work land that belongs to others in order to survive and these land owners, you know whether they’re paying the workers or not, become a sort of master, what you might call a boss today. I think the word enslaver is more appropriate, honestly paid or unpaid, because the system forced these people to labor this way whether they were actually enslaved or not, there was really no alternative. Gray writes quote “Now the lot of most people, children included, was servitude. The principal lessons that children had to learn were obedience, suppression of their own will, and the show of reverence toward lords and masters. A rebellious spirit could well result in death,” end quote.

But still so far in our story there are no schools. There is no formal schooling. So far we’ve seen children go from playing freely all day as hunter-gatherers, learning through self-led play, to being forced to work long hours in the fields or take care of siblings so that parents could work long hours in fields. And also learning to be obedient to a sort of master who told them what to do and punished them when they didn’t do it. That’s the learning going on after the agricultural revolution: how to tend to crops, how to tend to younger siblings, how to do what you’re told. Actual formal schools do not arise, to our knowledge, until the Middle Kingdom in ancient Egypt around 2040 BC. So that’s just over 4,000 years ago. These early schools were started by a guy named Kheti who served as treasurer under Pharoah Mentuhotep II. But these schools were not for everyone. They were for the sons of nobility only. There they would have learned reading, writing, arithmetic, and administration. They would have been trained as scribes, scholars, and for roles in government. So this was a way to train future politicians essentially to make bureaucracy in Egypt a sustainable thing. If you were not a boy or you did not come from a noble family, you did not go to school or receive any kind of formal education and that will remain true for the next several thousand years.

We see a sort of formal schooling emerge in ancient Mesopotamia as well which actually predates ancient Egypt as a civilization. Mesopotamia, specifically Sumer, was the home of cuneiform writing. This is the first written language. Yes, Egyptians had hieroglyphics but those were just symbols representing words. This was the first written language with symbols representing sounds, letters essentially, like in modern writing. So cuneiform was really the first actual writing system. Big deal. But very few people in ancient Mesopotamia could actually read or write in it of course. So we see the emergence of education there as a way to teach people how to read and write cuneiform so they can serve as scribes. Scribes made copies of written text, this is pre-printing press by a lot. Before that everything printed had to be written by hand over and over again. Scribes were essential in Mesopotamia for recording trade, religious texts, and legal transactions. But still, like in Egypt, school is very exclusive, reserved only for sons of nobility as well as priests.

So we had a major shift with agriculture 12,000 years ago, now we see another shift because of the emergence of written language and the need to teach certain people how to read and write it. When we get to ancient Greece, schooling blossoms quite a bit and it actually looks a bit more similar to education today. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, we still pretty much live in ancient Athens. So far, it’s been about learning practical skills. Learn how to plow a field. Learn how to write cuneiform. Learn this to perform this needed act. Ancient Greece changes that. They’re still learning practical skills but they're also now learning how to think and how, in theory, to be good people, to be good citizens. It becomes a lot more philosophical in ancient Greece. Philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle helped shape this shift. That was true for most of ancient Greece except for Sparta. Sparta was doing its own thing. Sparta was an ancient Greek city state that was very militaristic. That was their whole focus. They were going to be the best fighters. And so in Sparta, boys were taken away from their homes when they were around 7 years old and went to live in dormitories which were really more like military barracks. And there they were taught how to fight. They learned various sports and fighting and that’s pretty much it. And in Sparta, it was public. This air quotes education was controlled and mandated, forced, by the government. But that was not the case in the rest of Greece. It may have looked a lot more like our schooling today in Athens, they’re learning reading and writing, music, they have PE, right physical education, philosophy, there’s an emphasis on critical thinking, all that, but it’s not public. It’s strictly private education. You have to pay to go to school and only wealthy families could afford to do that. Also strictly boys. Girls did not have access to formal schooling in Greece, except in Sparta where it was public they also included girls although they learned vastly different things than the boys.

In ancient Rome, still just private schools for boys only, it swings back towards practicality a bit. They cut out some of the philosophy and fluffy stuff the Greeks were doing and focus on skills that were needed for these wealthy boys to enter government positions, or to be lawyers or public speakers. A bit of a return to what they were doing in ancient Egypt almost. Teach the sons of nobility to one day take over and run the government so the empire doesn’t collapse. But then, of course, the empire does collapse in 476 AD and we now enter the Medieval period or Middle Ages. As I’ve talked about before, this was a backslide, a regression of sorts and so formal schooling sort of falls by the wayside except in a religious context. People were very religious in the middle ages. Christianity was sort of hot off the press having been adopted by ancient Rome shortly before the fall and so now it’s really all people have left. So we see monks taking charge of education through monastic schools that focused on religious instruction where they mostly just meticulously copied ancient texts, the scribes of ancient Mesopotamia all over again. Still pre-printing press here. Gutenberg wouldn’t do his thing until 1440.

In the middle ages, we also see guilds arise. Guilds were like organizations, networks of people in the same trade. So you might have a locksmith guild or a weaving guild. And part of this was teaching people the trade, the skills needed to perform that trade. So we have guild schools where young people would serve as apprentices under a master craftsman in order to learn that trade. But once again this is exclusive. It’s strictly boys of course and it’s only boys who have been accepted into that guild which was mostly just the sons of men who were already in the guild. So access to guild schools was very limited. Now in contrast, if you listened to my mini fix about the city of Timbuktu over on Patreon, while the Christian world in Europe was sort of struggling during this time and education was left by the wayside, the Muslims down in Timbuktu in Africa were thriving academically. Muslims came from all over to attend these schools in Timbuktu and it was this major center of learning and exchange of scholarly thought that just was not happening in Europe and hadn’t really happened there since the days of ancient Greece. I find that so interesting because they really don’t teach you that. Our western, white, Christian centered society likes to conveniently leave out how the brown Muslims down in Timbuktu were leaving us in the dust during the Middle Ages. You can find that mini fix at patreon.com/historyfixpodcast if you want to learn more.

With the collapse of the Roman Empire and the start of the Middle Ages, we also see a change in the way society was structured in Europe. It went from one centralized government controlled by an emperor to a bunch of different lords and masters all over controlling smaller areas, a feudal system, which was very hierarchical with a few at the top and most at the bottom. And so we see a lot more of what Professor Gray was talking about with the agricultural revolution. We see people, even children, forced into servitude. Because while there are sort of schools, right the monastic schools, the monks, and the guild schools, very few people are actually attending them. These were not happy times to be a child. Gray says quote “In the Middle Ages, lords and masters had no qualms about physically beating children into submission. For example, in one document from the late 14th or early 15th century, a French count advised that nobles' huntsmen should "choose a boy servant as young as seven or eight" and that "...this boy should be beaten until he has a proper dread of failing to carry out his master’s orders" (Orme, 2001). The document went on to list a prodigious number of chores the boy would perform daily and noted that he would sleep in a loft above the hounds at night to attend to the dogs' needs,” end quote. And that was his education. Do what I say or I’ll beat you. That was what they were teaching this boy of 7 or 8.

But don’t worry, the Renaissance is coming, it’s going to get better, right? It’s going to get so much better. For a couple guys. We do see a major revival of formal education during the Renaissance which started in Europe in the 13, 1400s. They harken back to the times of ancient Greece and Rome and they start reading texts from those time periods. The philosophy comes back. They’re studying ancient literature. They’re studying history. And then boom, the printing press changes everything in 1440. Now every single book doesn't have to be painstakingly transcribed by hand. They can print copy after copy of books and they become much more available to the masses. Knowledge becomes more available and schools start popping up all over Europe. But still it’s private and it’s really only available to wealthy boys. The vast majority of children are still not attending school and they are still, for the most part, forced into servitude and pretty much just learning how to be obedient and how to do what they’re told.

Then something else significant happens in the 1500s, the protestant reformation. A German priest named Martin Luther rises up as a key figure of this movement to challenge the authority of the Catholic Church and the protestant church is born. And with this comes a somewhat startling realization. Martin Luther had declared that salvation depended on people reading scripture, people reading the bible. You can’t truly be a Christian if you don’t read the bible. Well the problem with that was, the vast majority of people at this time did not know how to read. So Luther and other leaders of this movement started pushing for public education to teach people how to read the scriptures so their souls would be saved and whatnot. And this led to what may have been the first compulsory education where children were required to attend school in Prussia, which was like pre-Germany, but these schools were run by the church, not the government. Although it’s possible the Aztecs were doing this first, compulsory education. In Aztec society, all children, including girls, although they learned different things, were required to attend school. The Aztec education system was set up much like that of the earlier Nahua people which suggests that the Nahua were doing it even earlier than the Aztecs. So, you know, Prussia can think it was first but also Prussia doesn’t even exist anymore so there you go.

In America, in the mid 1600s, Massachusetts which was then just a colony was the first to mandate education for children. Massachusetts was a Puritan colony, very religious, so same reasons for doing this as in Europe, so people could read the bible. So we’re starting to see a shift towards the actual education of children in order to read scripture. That's the whole focus right now, we just need people to be good Christians. But this sort of grinds to a halt with the onset of the industrial revolution. Because the focus shifts. We don’t just need children to be good Christians anymore, we need them to be good factory workers. Gray writes quote “With the rise of industries and of a new bourgeoisie class, feudalism gradually subsided, but this did not immediately improve the lives of most children. Business owners, like landowners, needed laborers and could profit by extracting as much work from them as possible with as little compensation as possible. Everyone knows of the exploitation that followed and still exists in some parts of the world. People, including young children, worked most of their waking hours, seven days a week, in beastly conditions, just to survive. The labor of children was moved from fields, where there had at least been sunshine, fresh air, and some opportunities to play, into dark, crowded, dirty factories. In England, overseers of the poor commonly farmed out paupers' children to factories, where they were treated as slaves. Many thousands of them died each year of diseases, starvation, and exhaustion. Not until the 19th century did England pass laws limiting child labor. In 1883, for example, new legislation forbade textile manufacturers from employing children under the age of 9 and limited the maximum weekly work hours to 48 for 10- to 12-year-olds and to 69 for 13- to 17-year-olds,” end quote.

I have chills reading that. So around this time, starting in the 1800s, we see a push for legally requiring children to attend school, compulsory education, in the US. This started with Massachusetts in 1852 and ended with Mississippi, the last state to make it a law, in 1918. And this idea caught on in the rest of the world as well, this idea that we needed to make sure all of the children were educated. And there were different motives for this and, unfortunately, most of them had very little to do with the actual wellbeing of the children. We’ve already talked about religious motives. Children needed to be educated, they needed to be able to read and write, so that they could read the bible and learn about religion. We’ve touched on industrial motives. Gray writes quote “Employers in industry saw schooling as a means to create better workers. To them, the most crucial lessons were punctuality, following directions, tolerance for long hours of tedious work, and a minimal ability to read and write. From their point of view (though they may not have put it this way), the duller the subjects taught in schools the better,” end quote. Because it wasn’t actually about learning for the sake of learning, expanding your ability to think and synthesize information and draw conclusions, it was about practicing obedience and tolerating tedious work. And then we have a third motive which harkens back to ancient times actually, that need to train the youth to someday take over and rule the country. Of this Gray writes quote “As nations gelled and became more centralized, national leaders saw schooling as a means of creating good patriots and future soldiers. To them, the crucial lessons were about the glories of the fatherland, the wondrous achievements and moral virtues of the nation's founders and leaders, and the necessity to defend the nation from evil forces elsewhere,” end quote. Very few people, in these early days of public education and education reform that started in the 1800s, very few people seem to be concerned with the actual well being of the children, with what’s best for the development of the children. It’s all about what do I need from these children. What do I need to get out of them. Who do I need them to be to best benefit me and what I want, be it religion, industry, or politics.

I want to expand on the second motive a little bit, the industry motive, training factory workers, because I think it played a significant role in how modern education came to be and I think it contributed greatly to its many shortcomings. Okay, I’ll start by saying that there was a problem that needed to be solved. We needed to educate our children and we needed that education to be fair, right, to be accessible. And ever since schools became a thing way back in ancient Egypt, ever since then, they had never really been fair or accessible. They had always been reserved for wealthy boys and that was pretty much it. And that perpetuated this social hierarchy where the rich stayed rich and the poor stayed poor and the men stayed in power and the women stayed oppressed. If you weren’t born on top, you were never going to get there. But that’s not America. That’s not the American dream, the whole reason millions of people immigrated to this country. According to the American dream, it does not matter what life you were born into, you can achieve anything. There is no limit to your success. It’s yours for the taking. And so something had to be done because unless education was accessible to all, the American dream would not work. And I think there were people who genuinely championed this cause, for whom this was the motive. Horace Mann, for example, who is known as the Father of American Education. Mann was a lawyer and legislator in Massachusetts. He was also an abolitionist and education reformer who was in large part responsible for helping establishing free public education in Massachusetts which we know then spread to the rest of the country and most of the world. I think Horace Mann had mostly good intentions. There are other big players in education, however, whose motives I question.

We have people like Andrew Carnegie who funded the construction of thousands of public libraries, made significant financial contributions to universities, and who focused on training and supporting teachers. Amazing. And then there’s John D. Rockefeller who funded the General Education Board which was formed in 1902 to promote education quote “without distinction of race, sex, or creed.” This board focused on improving schools in rural areas, especially in the south which were notoriously underfunded and under-resourced. It all sounds fantastic on paper. Hats off to these selfless philanthropists. But then, when you realize, who these guys were and how they made their fortunes you start to wonder if their motives were really all that pure. Andrew Carnegie was the head of a monopoly in the steel industry called Carnegie Steel. Rockefeller headed a second monopoly, Standard Oil. These were fairly unscrupulous guys. You don’t get to the top, you don’t monopolize a whole industry by being a fair business man. These guys got to the top by forcing others down and manipulating situations to go their way. And so when one of them throws 180 million dollars at a new education board that’s going to be enacting his idea of what the education of children should look like, kind of makes you go “hmm.” What’s in it for you Rockefeller? There are all kinds of conspiracy theories out there that John D. Rockefeller had his hands and his millions in public education in the US because he was trying to churn out factory workers, employees that would be obedient and do whatever they were told and not complain, a complacent workforce. There are others who refute that and say, you know, no he was just a generous philanthropist concerned with helping society, the greater good. You can make up your own mind here but let’s take a look at what sorts of changes the General Education Board put into place with the help of Rockefeller’s very generous donation. Please note, if you are watching the video version on YouTube or Patreon you are seeing a picture of the 15 members of the General Education Board and they are all middle aged white men. So pretty poor representation there.

One main focus of this organization was improving rural schools across the American south which were seen as underprivileged. So what we have going on in these rural southern communities is essentially one room schoolhouses with mixed ages all learning together from each other and from a teacher who was typically not highly trained. These schoolhouses were deeply connected to the community and parents were often involved in their child’s education. The day was structured around both a morning and afternoon recess period as well as a one hour lunch around noon. Some children would walk home to eat lunch with their families while others brought their lunch to school. According to Marathon County Historical Society quote “Because of their rural setting, one-room schools were often thought of as poor, unfortunate places where an education was mediocre at best. This was not the case. The one-room setting of these schools was often an advantage. In these country schools, students had more flexibility between grades. Students were advanced based on their abilities, not on their ages. Students who excelled could sit with older students and students who needed more help could sit with younger students. Since everybody was in the same room, it really didn’t matter who was in what class,” end quote.

But this assumed mediocre education is the very thing the General Education Board had set out to eradicate. So they come in, with Rockefeller’s money and build these big modern school buildings. They bus the children in. They separate them by age into grade levels and sort them into separate classrooms, each headed by a trained teacher who mostly focuses on rote memorization and regurgitation of facts. There are bells that ring at the beginning and end of the day. They have set procedures for where and when and how to eat lunch, how to move through the hallway, when they are allowed to use the bathroom. They are expected to follow these rules and procedures or face punishment. There is very little time for recreation or play. Younger children might go outside for 30 minutes during a 7 hour school day but by the time you’re 11, nothing, no outside time, no play. And then after the 6 or 7 hour day when they bus you back home you then have another hour or so of homework to do. And what I’m describing to you, this model of schooling, has not changed very much at all over the last hundred plus years. I’m describing a modern school. And so in some ways, yes it’s better. They now have highly trained teachers. The building might be better equipped. They have better learning materials, books and whatnot. But a lot is also lost, a lot of value that wasn’t even acknowledged by people like John D. Rockefeller. He takes this multi-age, student led, community centered schoolhouse model and he transforms it into something that looks and functions a whole lot like a factory. So was this all a devious plot to transform American children into mindless factory workers top dogs like Rockefeller could then exploit? Probably not directly, but maybe just a little bit. All I’m saying is, you don’t become the richest man in the world and founder of a monopoly by doing what’s best for others.

And then we have to look at the way punishments were doled out in schools for most of time. Corporal punishment, using physical force to inflict pain as a form of discipline for unacceptable behavior. Corporal punishment, literally beating children who misbehaved, was the norm. Professor Gray writes quote “The brute force methods long used to keep children on task on the farm or in the factory were transported into schools to make children learn. Some of the underpaid, ill-prepared schoolmasters were clearly sadistic. One master in Germany kept records of the punishments he meted out in 51 years of teaching, a partial list of which included: "911,527 blows with a rod, 124,010 blows with a cane, 20,989 taps with a ruler, 136,715 blows with the hand, 10,235 blows to the mouth, 7,905 boxes on the ear, and 1,118,800 blows on the head" Clearly, that master was proud of all the educating he had done,” end quote. And when we talk about beating children for misbehaving, that misbehaving might just be having trouble sitting still all day, having trouble staying silent all day, having trouble focusing on boring lessons… you know, just things literally all children have trouble with because that’s not what children are supposed to be doing. And guys, are you ready for your jaws to hit the floor? Corporal punishment in schools, to date, is still legal in 17 US states including North Carolina, my very own state and I had absolutely no idea. If you’re watching the video version, I’m showing you a map of which states allow it. It’s pretty much all of the southern states as well as a few in the midwest and then Arizona, Idaho, and Wyoming. Pretty much also the states with the lowest teacher pay. According to NEA today quote “As of 2024, corporal punishment is legal in 17 states and practiced in 14. An additional six other states have not expressly prohibited it… During the 2017-18 school year, roughly 69,000 students received corporal punishment, down from 107,000 in 2013. The most recent number available—about 20,000 students in 2020-21—is much lower because in-person instruction and data reporting were disrupted during the pandemic,” end quote. Yeah, hard to beat children through a computer screen. I am floored by this. Floored. Gray writes quote “Children whose drive to play is so strong that they can't sit still for lessons are no longer beaten; instead, they are medicated,” end quote. So apparently he doesn’t realize this either. I mean he’s from Massachusetts which is not one of the states that allows corporal punishment. But, I mean, I assumed none of them did. You mean to tell me that in the 8 years I taught in North Carolina I could have legally been hitting my students and I had no idea. Like, seriously what the heck North Carolina and 16 other states? What the actual heck. The medication point Gray brings up is chilling as well. If we can’t beat children into sitting still all day, into defying their natural instincts for 7 hours straight, we’ll just drug them instead, sedate them into a stupor. That’ll do the trick.

Overall, education has changed very little since those reforms in the early 1900s orchestrated by Rockefeller’s General Education Board. Although I will say from experience there is a push, even since I was in school in the 90s and early 2000s, even in the time since I started teaching in 2013 and then left the classroom 8 years later, there was a noticeable shift away from rote memorization and towards critical thinking, student-led inquiry, problem solving, exploration, cooperation, movement, and, yes, even play. There are a lot of teachers out there really trying to make that happen in schools that are still just concerned with that test score at the end of the year. One of the many things that makes teaching the right way an almost impossible job.

But this model, this model for modern public education, is it working? Is it really what’s best for our children? Forcing them to sit still in chairs all day, silent, completing mind numbingly boring tasks with very few opportunities to play? Memorizing facts to regurgitate later on a test and then promptly forgetting them? Could we be doing this better? Gray writes quote “In sum, for several thousand years after the advent of agriculture, the education of children was, to a considerable degree, a matter of quashing their willfulness to make them obedient laborers. A good child was an obedient child, who suppressed his or her urge to play and explore and dutifully carried out the orders of adult masters. Such education, fortunately, was never fully successful. The human instincts to play and explore are so powerful they can never be fully beaten out of a child. But the philosophy of education throughout that period, to the degree that it could be articulated, was the opposite of the philosophy that hunter-gatherers had held for hundreds of thousands of years earlier… School today is the place where all children learn the distinction that hunter-gatherers never knew—the distinction between work and play. The teacher says, "you must do your work and then you can play." Clearly, according to this message, work, which encompasses all of school learning, is something that one does not want to do but must; and play, which is everything that one wants to do, has relatively little value. That, perhaps, is the leading lesson of our method of schooling. If children learn nothing else in school, they learn the difference between work and play and that learning is work, not play. Will we ever wake up and overcome this terrible history?,” end quote.

I sincerely hope so. It’s what I strive to do in my profession, make learning fun, make learning play, educate children while still letting them be children. But unfortunately that is not the norm. And until we make it so, until we finally decide to educate in a way that’s best for the children, not in a way that’s best for the adults, best for the farmers, best for the religious leaders, best for the industry tycoons, the businessmen, best for the government, until we make this shift our education system will continue to fail the most precious and vulnerable part of our society, our children, our future.

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.

Information used in this episode was sourced from Professor Peter Gray via Substack, PBS, Duke Sanford Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society, Marathon County Historical Society, NEA Today, Think Interntional Schools, the Center on Eduction Policy, and Wikipedia. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.

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