Abstract
This chapter describes the evolution of educational institutions through a number of stages: the philosophical schools of ancient Greece; schools established and overseen by the Christian Church; the era of the town school (and the advent of universities); the emergence of guild schools; and, finally, the rise of mass compulsory education in the mid-nineteenth century. We examine how each new period in education has brought with it new educational practices and aspirations, together with new threats. We assert that the practice of education has always been and remains vulnerable to the acquisitiveness of the institutions and the people who inhabit them, and we conclude that the battle between education and schooling is an ongoing one.
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Notes
- 1.
When people in schools and communities work to reform or transform how their schools work , they are putting into practice what Marx suggested in the Third Thesis on Feuerbach (see Chap. 1).
- 2.
Including not only teachers, but also principals and educational administrators, professional developers, and educational researchers.
- 3.
To treat particular forms of schooling as ‘problematic ’ is to enquire whether they have untoward consequences like leading us into falsehood or unreasonableness, unproductiveness or unsustainability, or injustice or undemocratic ways of being.
- 4.
Different authors date the beginning of the modern period differently. In Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Stephen Toulmin (1990) dates Modernity from the time of René Descartes (1596–1650) and the rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century, until about the 1960s. Postmodernity might reasonably be dated from the beginning of the ‘digital age ’ in the 1960s or 1970s. Modernity encompasses the rise of scientific thought through the period called ‘the Enlightenment’, including the Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), arguably reaching its height in the scientific progress of the last part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth centuries. In Postmodernity, some of the certainties of Modernity about science and scientific progress have come under challenge. A good account of the thought of postmodernism can be found in Lyotard’s (1984) book The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge .
- 5.
International comparisons are made between school systems through programs like the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the testing by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in its Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).
- 6.
The (Australian) National Assessment Program–Literacy and Numeracy is a nationwide program of assessment of all students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in every Australian school overseen by the Australian Curriculum , Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). For details of the program, see http://www.nap.edu.au/naplan/naplan.html.
- 7.
The MySchool website, also coordinated by the Australian Curriculum , Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), gives information about individual Australian schools and provides comparisons of their performance with so-called like schools. For details of MySchool, see http://www.myschool.edu.au/.
- 8.
The original site of the classical Lyceum , rediscovered during excavation near Athens’s Museum of Modern Art in 1996, was opened to the public in 2013.
- 9.
For example, Aristotle is known to have taught his pupils while strolling around the grounds of the Lyceum , so some people called his school ‘the Peripatetics’, from ‘peripatetikos’, the ancient Greek word for ‘given to walking about’.
- 10.
Apart from his military successes in defending Egypt, Ptolemy I is also remembered for being the sponsor of Euclid (mid-fourth-century BC–mid-third-century BC), the geometrician. Euclid apparently followed researches of Plato and Plato ’s students in constructing his Elements of Geometry, but also apparently followed Aristotle in other work , for example, on specific gravity.
- 11.
It is a matter of historical debate which historical disaster was the basis for this powerful symbol—whether it was the accidental destruction of a book store near the dockyards in Alexandria, during the 48 AD siege of Alexandria during Julius Caesars’s conquest of Alexandria (which did not include the Royal Library, which was elsewhere), or in the mid-third-century AD, when the Emperor Aurelian took the city and damaged buildings in the compound containing the Royal Library (but did not destroy the ‘daughter library’, the Serapeum, which was sacked, and its books sent to Constantinople), or in 391 AD, when Christian Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria issued a decree for the destruction of the pagan temples of the city (which included the famous philosophical school in Alexandria and likely also included the Serapeum). It seems unlikely to have occurred in 642 AD, however, with the Muslim conquest of Egypt, when Caliph Omar was said to have ordered the destruction of texts in the city held to be contrary to the Koran. See Hannam’s (2011) book, The Foundation and Loss of the Royal and Serapeum Libraries of Alexandria.
- 12.
The 2009 film, Agora (directed by Alejandro Amenábar and starring Rachel Weisz) tells the story of the (woman) philosopher, astronomer and scientist Hypatia [born ca. AD 350–370; died 415], head of the Platonist school of philosophy in Alexandria, who was murdered by a Christian mob after a dispute arose between followers of Orestes, Roman Governor of Egypt, who was concerned about the intrusion of ecclesiastical laws into secular life , and Cyril, the Christian Bishop of Alexandria, whose followers wanted to impose their version of a Christian way of life on all Alexandrians. The film is a work of fiction, of course, going beyond the known facts of Hypatia’s life , but imagines an intriguing moment in the history of Alexandria and the Roman Empire.
- 13.
Le Goff believes that we have a false picture of the middle ages as an era of churches and stone buildings—those buildings were the few that survived. Except within the churches and monasteries, the arts of stonemasonry were almost lost to European society in that period, and most building was once again in timber. In general, those timber buildings have not survived.
- 14.
Some of this anxiety about the world beyond the monastery walls, as well as the struggles between different versions of mediaeval belief within the Church, is depicted in the Italian scholar Eco’s (1980/1983) celebrated book, The name of the rose, about a series of murders in a monastery and about the struggle between emerging scientific thought and religious dogmatism within the Roman Catholic Church. The book was made into the 1986 movie, The Name of the Rose, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater.
- 15.
See University of Oxford: Organisation : History https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/organisation/history?wssl=1.
- 16.
As Hamilton indicates, pupils in a single row often stood in a semicircle around a banner with a lesson on it. As each mastered the lesson, he or she might move forward to the next row. The banner was called a ‘standard’, thus giving us the educational term ‘standards’.
- 17.
In the mid-twentieth century, in many countries, students were segregated by ability into different kinds of schools, especially in the compulsory years of secondary education. Following the 1944 Education Act in England and Wales, for example, students were separated (by the 11+ examination, taken after pupils had turned 11 years old) into the ‘grammar’ schools for academic study (oriented towards the professions) and ‘secondary modern’ schools for a form of education (oriented towards the trades). In mid-twentieth-century Australia, several states segregated secondary education students into ‘high’ schools for the academically capable, and ‘technical ’ schools aimed towards the trades.
- 18.
In Australia, the word ‘gymnasium’ is often used for such large halls, especially when they are specifically designed for physical education, but also able to be used for larger assemblies of students. While we might think of the gymnasium or ‘gym’ entirely in the context of physical exercise or physical education, the word also has other uses and connotations—in German and other European languages, for example, a ‘gymnasium’ is an academic high school, and its use recalls the ancient Greek education of aristocratic young men who were prepared, in ‘gymnasia’, to be warriors and, later, to be orators or philosophers as well.
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Kemmis, S., Edwards-Groves, C. (2018). The Double History of Schooling: The History of a Practice and the History of an Institution. In: Understanding Education. Springer Texts in Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6433-3_2
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