Standardized testing is the bane of some students’ existence as they go through school. Students start getting nervous in the weeks before, as their teachers are taking class time up with preparation worksheets and tips. Standardized tests have been in America for more than 50 years, according to Time Magazine‘s “A Brief History of Standardized Testing.”
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The entire environment of the school system and the administrative structure has changed rapidly in the past few years. Teachers are now being held more accountable and students are required to test more frequently. Many of these changes also happened nine years ago, with the introduction of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). …
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The classroom is structured the way it is today because of the different ‘ages’ in history that have had profound and lasting impacts on the history of education.
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The education of the young mind is an important step in readying the child for future learning experiences. The evolution of early childhood education has transformed how adults and parents view the importance of offering stimulating and exciting opportunities to the very young. Early childhood education offers toddlers learning experiences that benefit them throughout their educational career.
According to Pre-K Now, the concept of early childhood education started with a European mother in the early 1800’s that educated children outside of their homes. The idea came to America during the Industrial Revolution with “infant schools” set up in churches, factories, and private homes to care for the young while parents were working. The state of Wisconsin created constitutional amendments to include committees dedicated to free education of children aged four to twenty in 1848 and then later, in 1873, started the first four year old kindergarten program.
As time progressed, other states began to follow Wisconsin’s lead in the area of early childhood education with preschools, day care centers, and nursery programs starting across the country. In 1926, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) was established dedicated to improving the well-being of all young children and focusing on the quality of education and developmental services offered to children from birth to the age of eight.
Head Start, founded in 1965 as a program through the United States Department of Health and Human Services, was originally founded to ready low-income children over the summer months for upcoming kindergarten. Over the years, Head Start has become a respected preschool aged program found in many communities working with children of all backgrounds and abilities.
The concept of educating young children within the family has been happening for many, many years, but the evolution of early childhood education within an outside setting has many different theories and facets. The studies conducted by Jean Piaget along with the work he did with children, paved the way for educators to create different styles of teaching to use within programs. Many of these theories of teaching are used in preschools around the country. They include:
Early childhood education is an important step in educating children and offering stimulating opportunities for exploring and learning.
By Sarah Lipoff. Sarah is an art educator and parent. Visit Sarah’s website here.
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The classroom is taught the way it is today because of the different ‘ages’ in history. Ages like the Industrial Revolution and Information Age have had profound and lasting impacts on the history of education.
Teaching methods are beginning to change, ever slowly, however.
“Over the last two hundred years, the common school and its one-size-fits-all curriculum have evolved into a larger union school with wide course offerings,” according to School: The Story of American Public Education, a PBS series.
But classrooms still have a long way to go.
In the Industrial Age, education was handled much differently than today. There were one room school houses and farming was the main livelihood in society.
This age changed what was required from the workforce. Society needed lots of people to work in factories and so the factory model of learning was established. The factory concept applies directly to education today. Companies needed to provide somewhat educated workers and the principles of mass production were implemented. The factory model was a system of education. These companies took a person, trained them and when the person came out at the end of the training, they were certified to go work in the factory setting.
Also popular during the Industrial Age was the mass production model, which focuses on scoring well on exams and essentially memorizing data to repeat it at a later time.
Besides the mass production model, the popular psychology term behaviorism also came into play in the educational sector. 20th century teacher and researcher B.F. Skinner believed in behaviorism, a concept that states that anyone can learn anything and the mind of the learner is blank.
Skinner believed a person’s prior experience was irrelevant and that a capable instructor can break down any concept, repeat it and any person can learn it, regardless of the knowledge they had before. John B. Watson was the founder of behaviorism.
Additionally, Skinner worked with operant conditioning, which correlates to enforcing behavior in school children today. If a child is asked to stay after school for acting out in class, this would be an example of operant conditioning. The student would see that he or she will get punished for their actions and they may be unlikely to commit whatever act they did that got them in trouble, again.
Skinner, however, also had the idea that positive reinforcement was better than punishment. By not necessarily rewarding the student and instead praising him or her for positive behavior, Skinner would have found this more beneficial because of the general definition.
“A behavior will increase if it is followed by positive reinforcement. It will decrease if it is followed by punishment. Operant conditioning is thus ‘learning by consequences,” according to Changing Minds.
The principles of operant conditioning are still used to explain teaching and learning techniques used in the classroom today.
“Positive communication is a tool to reinforce good behavior and eliminate bad behavior; it builds self-esteem and inspires confidence in children,” according to Family Education.
New changes
The education of the Industrial Revolution Era did not last, simply because things change, especially with a new Age of time.
The Age of Information took the country by storm in the 1970s. Noam Chomsky believed behaviorism did not make sense and he aimed to prove the point that people are not born with a blank slate or an innate ability to learn. He believed a person would learn a language whether they liked it or not. With Chomsky’s new behavior code, people began to have a whole new way of looking at how students learn.
The days of the Little House on the Prairie one-room schoolhouse may be over, but today’s challenges are new. An educator must consider the mind of the learner. It is not always one size fits all learning. Students have different learning styles and instead of focusing on the current ‘age,’ educators may need to tailor diverse learning styles to individual students. This philosophy allows teachers to draw from their experience, instead of using a comprehensive approach that may not suit every student.
Chomsky believed that there were some things no amount of learning could teach. In an interview from 1983, he said there was a relationship between heredity and the environment for the progression of human language.
“The language organ interacts with early experience and matures into the grammar of the language that the child speaks. If a human being with this fixed endowment grows up in Philadelphia, as I did, his brain will encode knowledge of the Philadelphia dialect of English. If that brain had grown up in Tokyo, it would have encoded the Tokyo dialect of Japanese. The brain’s different linguistic experience — English versus Japanese — would modify the language organ’s structure,” Chomsky said in the interview.
Going ahead into the next few decades, many technological advances will be made. These advances, such as the release of the iPad, may change the factory model into a workshop one, some suggest.
Others aren’t nearly as convinced.
“The model is premised on the belief of “progressive” educators that the best way to encourage deep and enduring understanding is through “discovery learning” in a small-group setting, where students puzzle out problems and acquire knowledge on their own,” according to a New York Teacher.
Therefore, what will happen with the history of education in the future is still yet to be determined. But one thing is for sure: with a multitude of theories and various ways of teaching created by educators, there certainly seem to be many ways for students to learn and adapt in the classroom.
By Kelly McLendon. Kelly is studying Environmental Policy and Journalism. She can be reached at mclendon.kelly@gmail.com.
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Our current education system dates back to the Industrial Revolution. At the time, our country needed to prepare its agricultural workers for factory jobs. So we built a school system that catered to the mass production mentality. This education system was efficient and measurable, and it churned out students who were ready to face the demands of our nation’s new economy.
In today’s age of instant information, the Industrial Revolution is a distant memory. So why is it that we still educate our students as if preparing them for a life of machine and assembly line work? Teaching by rote and following rigid academic agendas doesn’t cut it anymore. To say our scholastic curriculum is outmoded is putting it nicely.
Today’s children need to learn the skills that will help them in today’s job market and today’s society. They need to learn how to make decisions on their own, work well with others, and sift through vast amounts of information. And it’s time our schools rise to the occasion and fill this need.
To further explore the history of our current educational system, take a look at the following websites:
In Emile or on Education, a classic book on education reform, Jean Jacques Rousseau argues for a return to a more natural education.
John Dewey is perhaps the most influential American educator of the 20th century. Be sure to explore these additional web pages on Dewey.
For a comprehensive overview of the history of education, visit this post.
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