8 1.8 ORIGINS OF EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
Evidence that the school as an institution was historically necess¬ary is shown by the fact that it developed gradually during different periods, but at analogous stages, in all types of society. The adop¬tion of a school structure in education appears essentially to be linked with the systematization and steady increase in the use of written language. Learning to read naturally entailed a master with young people gathered round him, in a ‘classroom’, in a school.
Written Tradition
We do not in the least gainsay the immensity of the new powers, which writing, and later on the printing press, conferred on man, or the value of the services so rendered to education, above all by the printed book. But we note that this revolution also had certain less beneficial effects.
Whatever the place of rites and taboos in predominantly oral education, it involved direct contact with things and people. Books replaced these direct methods of trans¬mitting knowledge and nurtured the prejudice that the written word and its oral repetition was the embodiment of all knowl¬edge worthy of the name, much superior to lessons learned from daily life. This pre eminence of the written over the spoken word remains deeply embedded in most school systems today.
Master and Pupils
The growing store of knowledge and tradition was handed down this way for thousands of years from master to pupil, accompanied by strict, authoritarian, scholastic discipline, reflecting societies which were themselves founded on rigidly authoritarian principles. This sets the pattern for the authoritarian master pupil relationship, which still prevails, in most schools in the world.
Almost everywhere, churchmen depositaries and guardians of all knowledge dominated education, which in addition to transmitting religious dogma was used to train scribes and administra¬tors, doctors and architects, astronomers and mathematicians
Asiatic Tradition
Education in Asia developed according to similar patterns. Re¬spect for the written word reached its high point with the Chinese mandarins. Entrusted with the task of training State officials, the Chinese educational system, at first more open and liberal than others, was effective in teaching the harmony of thought and action until excessive formalism and a rigid system of grades and examina¬tions paralyzed it.
Asia’s first universities were those of the Brahmins in India, where they presented a consummate example of education based on philosophy and religion while at the same time stressing the study of mathematics, history, astronomy and even the laws of economics. Subsequently, Buddhist education emerged as a reac¬tion against the Brahminical doctrine of caste and their monopoly of education, yet it in turn became equally rigid.
Education in ancient Persia involved lifelong training, covering all an individual’s activities until the approach of old age. In addi¬tion to imparting knowledge of the sciences, moral virtues and intel¬lectual disciplines, it included civic training and apprenticeship in practical life.
Greco-Roman Tradition
Schools were highly honoured in classical Greece and Rome, where children and adolescents of the upper classes were diligent students. The school’s ideal was to form harmonious personalities with balanced intellectual, aesthetic and physical development. Knowledge, intelligence, appreciation of the arts and spiritual virtues were supreme values in an education designed for and con¬fined to the elite. This aristocratic conception was confirmed and adopted down through the centuries by imperial, royal, feudal and patrician societies structurally dedicated to cultivating a selective education, frequently of high quality, for the benefit of the minority, conferring the stamp of nobility on an elitist doctrine which remains very much alive in certain educational systems of our time.
Ancient Western societies regarded the sum of knowledge which went into making an educated man as a clearly defined whole. This was the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric; logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music which long remained the un¬shakeable foundation of a classical education. This classical education enjoyed such prestige that it tended to withdraw into its own universe and only grudgingly has it admitted contributions from the so called exact and the social sciences.
The Christian School
In the times when Christianity reigned supreme over a large part of the world, religion made its authority felt in every sphere of life. And its empire spread, above all, to education. One could say that in Europe in the Middle Ages the Church and education, with few exceptions, was one and the same thing. This does not mean that education, permeated with religion as it may have been, was incapable of adapting itself to the particular purposes of princes and merchants, clerks or warriors. Mediaeval education was es¬sentially a response to the conditions of feudal society as well as to religious ideas. Many Asian and Latin American societies, which long remained in a feudal stage of development, have had very similar systems that contributed to institutionalizing rigid social and cultural divisions. Many of the hierarchical forms and discriminatory practice for which current systems are blamed are in reality vestiges of an education devised for a very different type of society from those in which they survive.
Islamic Education
In many countries, Islam with its self appointed universal mission endeavored to define the objectives and methods appro¬priate to an education, which would be both lofty and far reaching. With its confidence in a person’s capacity to perfect him, or herself, through education, the Muslim world was among the first to recommend the idea of lifelong education, exhorting Muslims to educate themselves ‘from the cradle to the grave’. Islam enjoined all men, women and children, to educate themselves in order to educate others in turn. Muslim education paid special attention to learning in the sciences medicine, philosophy, mathematics and astronomy. By middle of the 9th century knowledge was divided into three categories: the Islamic sciences, the philosophical and natural sciences (Greek knowledge), and the literary arts. However, through distrust of heresy and subversion, certain educational systems in the Muslim world finally retracted into a reticent attitude towards the innovative spirit.
Advent of Modern Times
From the Reformation to the Renaissance and until the early days of the modern era, post mediaeval Europe exerted a powerful influence on the development of civilization, opening up vast horizons for knowledge, unleashing new social forces and redefining humanism. Yet, to a certain extent, this influence was slow to make itself felt on education, notwithstanding the fact that the develop¬ment of philosophic thought, the new vistas in psychology and the promotion of living languages to the dignified status of academic disciplines did enlarge the horizon and, here and there, vitalize practice.
At the same time a crucial change had taken place in the material means for educational action; the introduction of the printing press now made books, the containers of knowledge, available to the masses.
And, in fact, as economic progress created an increasing need for personnel capable of reading, writing and counting, education began to spread and be popularized, and in so doing necessarily took on many new forms.
