Education stayed pretty static from the time of Pythagoras up until the 1700s. And even then it really didn't change all that much until John Dewey and his ilk came along. And they haven't left it alone ever since. Even the social engineers didn't do the damage that Dewey and his behavioral scientist cohorts managed to precipitate upon public education.
What am I talking about? I'm saying that up until the 19th century, with few exceptions, teachers were in charge of education. True, we didn't have universal, compulsory schooling but what schooling we did have was mostly run and managed by parents and teachers.
In the early 1800s, however, that began to change. Well-meaning social do-gooders began to lobby for public schools where none were needed. They saw public schooling as an opportunity to put forward their own ideals for society. In other words, these social pioneers wanted to use the funding of the entire community to EXPERIMENT on everyone's children. You can read more about this in Blumenfed's work or John Taylor Gatto's tome (see my Recommended Resources).
Well that wasn't too terribly bad until. Until the insidious "science" of behavioral psychology arose out of the Germanic lands in the form of Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt went on to influence almost every major educational thinker for the next century and then some through the likes of Skinner, Dewey, Bloom, Piaget, et al.
In fact, to this day, these behavioral psychologists are still running the educational show paying little regard to what teachers and parents think or want. In fact, don't you know, they are the EXPERTS in research and learning and you, my friends - my wonderful public school friends - are their guinea pigs. They have many theories that need testing. And the best place to do this is, clearly, in arenas where they don't have to acquire grant money or foot the bill and where they will find little resistance - public schools.
Now before all this high-handed social engineering and psychological training, we were doing all right. We produced the likes of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Newton, Galileo, Jefferson, Washington, Milton, Bach, Beethoven, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and the like. We built pyramids, hanging gardens, palaces, produced the Roman civilization, mapped the stars, and even managed to write several religious texts which are still revered today. It seems that we were managing all right.
Now, however, thanks to the psychologists who are hell-bent on "fixing" everything and instituting the latest and greatest in educational theory, we are a mess. Our kids are now functionally illiterate (we once had almost universal literacy with no public schools), cannot located oceans or continents on a map (they could once draw and label the entire world), and cannot perform basic mathematical functions without calculators (who needs those pesky math facts anyway?). Yes, we've clearly made huge strides in education. Mmmm-hmmmm. Thank you, social engineers and psychologists for turning what was once the shining star of pedagogy into the crippling quagmire it has become.
One more thing. If you inquire of these psychologists, even the ones who claim to be experts in "educational history," you might very well find that they are quite knowledgeable on everything which occurred after Dewey. They seem to be wholly ignorant, however, on what, exactly, schooling looked like BEFORE Dewey. They might also be hard-pressed to explain why we don't go BACK to school the way it once was considering that, despite all its purported flaws, it actually managed to produce highly educated students who could read Latin and Greek and write impressive governmental documents that still inspire the world.
