Have you ever wondered why we have separated elementary and secondary schools? Why schools are broken into subjects? Why our schools look suspiciously like factories? It’s often more a result of inherited practice, political and social forces and economic influences – than because we know it’s best for our children.
By the 1930s, many regions across Canada offered a four year (grades 9-12) high school program. Once again, however, we looked back to our British roots and based these new schools on the English grammar school system that had been serving to educate and enlighten the elite. The traditional academic curriculum had been designed to prepare a small percentage of the population for university study. This format was applied to all students, though it was not particularly suitable for those with other goals6. You can still see the struggle between academic and applied studies evident in our high schools to this day.
Inherited Influences
Canada is a land of immigrants and we carried much of the culture and tradition of the United Kingdom with us to Canada’s shores. Our first elementary schools reflected both the influence of the church on education and the idea that intellectual pursuits were primarily for the upper class. They also replicated the English public school experience and its reliance on the three R’s as a standard teaching strategy. Students were expected to receive, retain, and return what they were taught1, a concept that can still be seen at work in our schools today. Surprisingly, the push for mass public education was not so much about democracy and equity, but primarily a response to industrialism’s need for an educated workforce. These early public schools were designed not only to teach the basics, but to encourage certain habits and behaviours that would be useful in a manufacturing workplace – respect for authority, punctuality and reliability2.
When Canada was founded in 1867, only about 40% of Canadian children attended any kind of public schooling3 and as in Britain, formal education ended for the majority of children around the age of 12. Instead of going to high school, most youth would go out into the world to apprentice with adults on farms, in shops and in workplaces. A very small percentage of people (mostly the elite) went on to further schooling. And that schooling was based on an academic approach that can be traced back through the United Kingdom into early European history. It was based on formal teaching, classical Greek education aimed to ‘train the mind’, the preservation of status and the education of clergy and clerics. For much of Canada’s developing years, there were two distinct ways of educating past elementary school – practical, real-world learning for the masses and theoretical, taught learning for a select few. How Did We Get Here? John Abbot Speaks
The Rise of Secondary Education
Over a hundred years ago American psychologists started to define the “rebelliousness” of adolescence as a ‘disease’ and an aberration. Psychologists and educational bureaucrats agreed that something had to be done to prevent teenagers from going awry. The immediate answer was to promote the placement of adolescents into formal, structured school environments for longer periods of time4.
In the 1930s, the push for free public secondary schooling gained momentum when the great depression hit and unemployment skyrocketed. American politicians recognized that having teenagers in school would take them out of the job market and leave more work for adult wage earners. Moreover, the training and hiring of new teachers created additional employment opportunities5. Influences on Developing School Structures
While mass public education and the introduction of secondary school became more widespread, their structure was shaped by two key movements that began in the United States. One was the introduction of scientific management in manufacturing and the other was the rise in popularity of the theory of behaviourism. John Abbott Discusses Why Our Schools Operate As They Do
Scientific Management – Creating Effective Economic Units At the beginning of the industrial revolution, factory owners were frustrated that new manufacturing capabilities were not translating into higher production at the rates they had anticipated. Frederick Winslow Taylor observed this phenomenon in his father’s business and set about examining the problem by applying objective scientific data to models of human labour. By using his stop-watch to measure exactly how long a task took, Taylor effectively invented Time and Motion studies. Taylor gathered his scientifically-based insights on efficient work strategies and used them to tell everyone in the factory exactly what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. Thinking people, he argued, risked disrupting the system. And it worked magnificently. Productivity soared. And workers became interchangeable widgets.
Taylor’s success at merging scientific management with the process of industrialization had a profound effect on the relationship of learning to education, and how education systems were to be organized.7. In 1907, Henry Pritchard, president of the highly influential Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, proclaimed that, “It is more and more necessary that every human being should become an effective, economic unit. What is needed is an educational system that is carefully adapted to the needs of the economy. A system that sorts people efficiently into various positions that need to be filled in the stratified occupational structure8”. And so the factory model of education took hold – a system with efficiency and economic productivity at its core, a system designed to sort students according to ability and potential usability – not nurture them as individuals to reach their full potential.
But How Do We Get Them to Behave? Reward and Punishment
The early 19th century saw the rise of behaviourism and its scientific approach to predicting and controlling human actions. Anything that couldn’t be measured, either did not exist or was not significant (an interesting parallel to many evaluation strategies promoted today). From Pavlov’s dog, trained to salivate at the sound of a bell to the Skinner box where rats ‘learned’ to press a lever for food, the application to human learning was both appealing and influential. Reducing the messy, complicated task of learning into programmed responses to outside stimuli meant that educating our youth was simply a matter of creating the right combination of reinforcement and punishment.: gold stars and red ‘X’s. Renowned behaviourist J.B. Watson went so far as to claim that he could take any 12 healthy infants and, by applying behavioral techniques, create whatever kind of person he desired. Schools that do their job properly would be bound to achieve the desired outcome. The echo of this approach is still visible in educational reform based on standardization, efficiency and measurable outcomes and also in the one size must fit all approach to learning. The Western education system as we see it today is more a culmination of various historical, political and economic influences – and not so much the outcome of measured, considered planning based on our beliefs about the purpose of education or best practices. The system has also been shaped by some very faulty assumptions about learning and human development: that children are blank slates, that human motivation to learn is the same as an animal’s motivation to act, that school is primarily a sorting mechanism for our economic needs. It’s time to re-assess our goals for education and re-envision how we educate – based on what we now know about human learning. |
Over the current decade, the growth rate in the 0-12 year age group will be negative. The implications of these demographic trends for human capital development [are significant]… it’s more important than ever that the human capital of children be developed as fully as possible if we are to raise the productivity of a future smaller labour force. Featured VideoPrograms at Work |
1Jane Gilbert, Catching the Knowledge Wave?:The Knowledge Society and the Future of Education. New Zealand Council for Educational Research Press, 2005.
2Katherine F.C. MacNaughton, The Development of the Theory and Practice of Education in New Brunswick, 1784-1900: A Study in Historical Background, University of New Brunswick, 1947.
3Statistics Canada, Historical Statistics of Canada, Section W: Education, F. H. Leacy Editor. Click here to view the relevant page on the Statistics Canada website.
4John Abbott and Terry Ryan, The Unfinished Revolution. Network Educational Press Ltd., 2001.
5 John Abbott and Terry Ryan, The Unfinished Revolution. Network Educational Press Ltd., 2001.
6Jane Gilbert, Catching the Knowledge Wave?:The Knowledge Society and the Future of Education. New Zealand Council for Educational Research Press, 2005.
7John Abbott, Master and Apprentice. Read unpublished manuscript (Note: look at the entry for June 20, 2007 on the What’s New page)
8As cited in John Abbott, Master and Apprentice (see footnote #7 for more details)
2Katherine F.C. MacNaughton, The Development of the Theory and Practice of Education in New Brunswick, 1784-1900: A Study in Historical Background, University of New Brunswick, 1947.
3Statistics Canada, Historical Statistics of Canada, Section W: Education, F. H. Leacy Editor. Click here to view the relevant page on the Statistics Canada website.
4John Abbott and Terry Ryan, The Unfinished Revolution. Network Educational Press Ltd., 2001.
5 John Abbott and Terry Ryan, The Unfinished Revolution. Network Educational Press Ltd., 2001.
6Jane Gilbert, Catching the Knowledge Wave?:The Knowledge Society and the Future of Education. New Zealand Council for Educational Research Press, 2005.
7John Abbott, Master and Apprentice. Read unpublished manuscript (Note: look at the entry for June 20, 2007 on the What’s New page)
8As cited in John Abbott, Master and Apprentice (see footnote #7 for more details)