Remembered Educational Lessons
"If twelve or fifteen hundred schools are to be placed under one general administration, an attention so divided will amount to a dereliction of them to themselves. It is surely better, then, to place each school at once under the care of those most interested in its conduct." - Thomas Jefferson: Plan for Elementary Schools, 1817."Parents who want them should receive vouchers, exchangeable at private schools of one's choosing. The social purpose would be to permit pluralism, individualism: and the adaptation of schools to the special needs of those who have special needs." - William F. Buckley, On the Right, 1968.
One conceit of modernism is the notion that all problems are new and little can be gleaned from antiquated experiences years, decades or even centuries old. While the pace of technological change accelerates, much wisdom resides in accumulated wisdom of the centuries. In pursuit of such insights from educational archeology, Andrew Coulson studied different pedagogical structures from antiquity to the present. His conclusions were presented at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1997.
Coulson defined educational success in terms of four criteria:
- meeting requirements of academic and moral instruction,
- engendering social harmony,
- providing broad access to education for all income levels, and
- being cost effective.
In the Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., education was provided for privately. Educational services arose purely from the demand of individuals. As a consequence, "the Athenians of this period were more schooled and more literate than any other people would be for the next thousand years." Even people of limited means managed to provide some years of education for their children.
What was perhaps most interesting is that rather than education becoming fragmented, there evolved a common core curriculum at lower educational levels with greater variety in curricula at higher levels.
Ancient Sparta provided an example of a contemporaneous state-run school educational structure. There the education system served the needs of the state emphasizing military education, robbing both parents and students of choice. At seven, male students were herded away to dormitories where instructors schooled them in "sports, endurance training, and fighting." Although state-run schools in modern democracies are more responsive than those of a authoritarian government, any state-run enterprise has at best three masters - the state, the institutional bureaucracy, and student/parent consumers.
Coulson goes on to document the correspondence of a "free educational market" and the affluence and high levels of literacy in the medieval Muslim empire. Provisions for education of the indigent were made by both religious and secular institutions during this period.
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