The Roots of Learning
Western Education’s Origins and Influences
“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.” - Aristotle (Greek Philosopher)
People who want to do well in school usually feel that way because they’ve been told that it’s the primary route to doing well in life.
Performance in school is usually measured by grades and those who get A’s are considered the cream of the crop. It’s no surprise that students tend to fall in love with A’s.
I know plenty of students who will do anything for the A. It’s so prevalent in society, that I was able to start a profitable tutoring business based on this need with little business experience and marketing. Some students genuinely needed help, but most just wanted the A.
Those who are interested in a fancy career, a nice house, and respect from others are the most likely to fall in love with the A’s. They believe that having the A’s will give them a fancy career, a nice house, and the respect they desire.
However, sometimes it doesn’t work out like that.
Sometimes people who succeed in school, fail in life.
And other times the people who fail in school, succeed in life.
The Issue with Curriculums
There are many reasons for this, but I’m going to start with the school curriculums.
Most curriculums were created for students to succeed in The World of Academics, not reverse-engineered to help students succeed in The World Beyond.
The typical school curriculum is not tailored to The World Beyond and the skills needed to succeed within those curriculums are not necessarily the skills we need in everyday life.
Many students pick up on this well before they enter the job market, and educators have to dedicate a lot of energy just to prove they’re teaching relevant information.
Students ask me at younger and younger ages why they have to learn what they’re being taught in school, and they have every right to wonder.
The worst part (in my opinion) is that as time goes on, more of the curriculums become harder to justify.
Origins and Influences of Western Education
To understand why this is the case, we’ll have to look into what influences these curriculums and why are they even being taught in the first place. After all, these institutions were brought about through tremendous effort and intentionality, and to carelessly denigrate an institution without understanding its purpose or origins increases our chances of undoing valuable work. Chesterton's Fence.
I mentioned this briefly earlier, but I want to emphasize these points:
Our current education system has roots in the Industrial Revolution back in 1760. The West had a massive transformation turning their textiles, agriculture, and handcrafts into large-scale factories with machines run by factory workers. Since there was a high demand for factory workers, the school systems were designed to educate as many people as possible to employ them at the factories.
Make no mistake. At the time, this was a great thing.
Factory jobs provided people with a higher quality of life (believe it or not) and were highly sought after. Nowadays, most people see education as a way to specifically avoid those kinds of jobs.
However, we can still see echos of this influence just by looking at a typical school schedule:
Start in the AM.
Take your 10-minute break roughly 2-3 hours in
Back to work
Lunch around the 5th hour.
Work again
Go home.
Repeat.
It’s just like working at a 9-5. Just like working in the factories. (Except breaks and lunches were monitored in the factories.)
It’s not like this system wasn’t good. It was wonderful at the time. It was effective and helped launch the Western world into the marvel it is today. We would not be here without industrialization.
Without industrialization, we wouldn’t be in the Information Age – when not knowing something is a matter of choice.
Today we can learn anything at any moment and talk to anyone in the world at any time.
We can know almost everything that everyone else knows in mere moments. 🤯
But the education system hasn’t been updated for this. There have been small improvements here and there, but not enough to address the issues that many students are dealing with today.
The same teaching methods are practiced year in and year out and are becoming exponentially irrelevant, especially with the growth of accessible technology, information, and artificial intelligence.
There are almost no efforts to teach students more effectively and efficiently in a way that matches up with the speed of today.
There have been some curriculums that are updated and more tailored to today’s dynamic and complex world, but traditions from the Industrial Revolution still carry the most weight.
The industrial revolution wasn’t the only influence on our education system. The content that is taught has a long line of historical influence that is worth paying attention to.
Much of today’s school curriculums are based on the curriculums of medieval monasteries, the ideas of 19th-century German educationalists, and the concerns of aristocratic court societies.
Those 19th-century educationalists designed their curriculums with a few key assumptions that underly most school curriculums today:
1) The most important things are already known.
2) What currently is, is all that could ever be.
3) Being original is dangerous.
These are all incorrect assumptions.
Part of the solution, in my opinion, will be to move larger parts of the curriculums towards concepts and ideas that teach students useful skills.
School is for learning, not job training.
Most places train on the job anyway. Realistically, there are only a few professions where the training is happening in the classroom.
Wrong Messages
Students are implicitly being taught that the only way to go about life is to ask permission and beg for acceptance.
Ask permission to use the restroom.
Ask permission to answer questions.
Ask permission to work at a job.
Ask permission to make money.
Ask permission to buy something.
Ask permission to make something.
Ask permission to live.
Too many people believe that you aren’t successful until someone else has permitted you to do something.
Now I know a large part of why students have to ask for so many things is to maintain order in a traditional classroom, but I believe this teaches a horrible implicit lesson. Therefore, it would be helpful for teachers (and other educators) to intentionally include times for students to not ask for permission. That could look many different ways, but we cannot have another generation of students who believe it is more important to ask permission than to act on their ideas. If given a compelling purpose, people will act constructively more often than not.
So many people believe that they’re limited by the income approved by their “boss.” Many people think their boss intrinsically knows their value and compensates them accordingly.
Too many people believe that we cannot create opportunities for ourselves.
We’re taught to deliver on expectations, not change them.
We’re taught to regurgitate ideas instead of originating them.
We’re taught to respect people in authority, rather than honestly contemplate the possibility that no one else knows what’s going on.
Change expectations! Originate ideas! Internalize that no one knows what going on!
There are liberating perspectives that can enrich the experience of our lives. If we search further than what our current systems are spoon-feeding us, then we will find a new and beautiful world where we can exercise our will to our fullest expression.
"Teachers should prepare the student for the student's future, not for the teacher's past." - Richard Manning (Engineer)
Evolving Education & Critical Targets
There were many key players in the evolution of education since the early days of the industrial revolution, and even earlier days of Ancient Greece.
One of the first was the teacher Noah Webster, who contributed several ideas to education like incorporating patriotism, establishing a national language and curriculum in the classroom, and lastly, that education should be free.
Horace Mann is described as the “Father of American Education”. His accomplishments included increasing public support for education that was for all children and supported by the state government, as well as bringing attention to the actual teacher profession and creating normal schools which were teacher training institutes. Mann believed in a child-centered approach to learning.
John Dewey was a person who brought about progressive education change in the classroom by making curriculum and pedagogy more student-centered, with problem-solving and learning through experience becoming more popular.
United States of America Founding Father, Benjamin Rush, laid out similar plans that would unify higher education as well. He sought colleges should teach higher branches of science, laws, physics, divinity, the law of nature, and economics.
In 1779, Thomas Jefferson, a huge proponent of accessible education, signed the Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge. This bill provided for the establishment of a system of public schools that would educate the masses with the basic education necessary to ensure good government, public safety, and happiness Jefferson proposed school would be free for white children, male and female, for three years as they study reading, writing, arithmetic, and history.
Now, I’m not just bashing the education system with no respect or regard for its miraculous achievements. Those key players along with countless others have helped make the incredible and unlikely progress that we have made. Incredibly, we have an institution that educates its young so they can go out and be enriched and powerful. We just need to modernize and improve effectiveness.
In any system, there are cracks and imperfections, and given the nature of a youth’s education, the consequences are not trivial. School teaches us so much, except for two critical subjects:
How to Work – choose the right job for us and work in a way that doesn’t take away from our lives. The right work will allow us to connect and contribute to our fellow humans and justify our existence.
How to Love – how to form satisfactory relationships with others and ourselves. It is no secret that our quality of life is highly correlated with the quality of our relationships.
If I had to write what education should be on a sticky note, it would be those two topics. A proper education that is full of meaning, purpose, and competence will teach people how to work and how to love.
But I have more to write on than a sticky note, so I want to include a few critical targets that I believe can help everyone create their perfect education.
A great education trains us to:
read well – this way we can learn and expand our understanding
write well – so we can learn to think and communicate powerfully
think critically – to think about thinking and see past the obvious
develop our characters – which determines our opportunities
build our best selves – so life is worth the pain
There is a huge need for a reversed-engineered curriculum that allows students to develop skills needed for The World Beyond. Something that shows students how to be outwardly obedient, but inwardly independent.