Let’s go back in
time; the early men didn’t learn anything in the four walls of a room, in fact
what they learnt was through exploration and discovery, they roam around,
experience and experiment things by themselves with no instruction whatsoever
from anyone .
In the course of history, gradually they were forced to
settle down and farm due to the weather and agricultural conditions abandoning
their nomadic lifestyle, then there came the need to increase and acquire
properties, laborers were needed on the farm and the people who couldn’t
afford or were too weak to acquire properties were forced to work for the rich
ones. There the era of kings, lords, slaves, servants and serfs began. Children
were also made to work on the farms in which working replaced the natural
instinct of a child to run free and play exploring his environment. Series of punishments
were meted down to children to suppress their will. Children as young as 7years
of age were made to work on farms or mines, they were constantly bullied by
grave punishments if they ever act according to their own will. In some places many deaths were recorded due to starvation,
disease and exhaustion.
This continued into the 19th century until child
labour was banned in England. Later on adults brought up the idea of the need
of a child to learn, and then education came along. Martin Luther declared that
salvation depends on each person’s own reading of the scriptures, in which he
meant that a child has to be educated in other to find salvation on his own so
that his soul will not be eternally damned.
Employers say schooling as a way of creating a better
worker. To them, the most crucial lessons were; following instructions,
tolerance of long hours of tedious work and so on. They implied that children
should learn moral lessons and discipline such as Latin and Mathematics that
would exercise their minds and turn them into scholars. with the use of
schooling, people began to think of learning as children’s work where by the
child is forced to follow some set of rules in a designated environment, they
were given little time to play(which is referred to as recess) and any form of
play in the classroom attracts a severe penalty. Therefore the idea of exploration
and discovering things which is in the child is replaced by inculcation. One
master in Germany kept records of the punishment he meted out during his
51years of teaching, a partial list of which included; 911,527 blows with a
rod. 124,010 blows with a cane, 20,989 taps with a ruler, 136,715 blows with
the hand, 10,235blows to the mouth, 7,905 boxes on the ear, and 1,118,800 blows
to the head. Clearly, that master was proud of all the ‘educating’ he has done.
Although the harsh methods of teaching has reduced in some schools
through the years , children are still made to study in a controlled
environment, with set of rules and made to follow a curriculum against their
will because they do not have a say in it. The lesson that the child must learn
are determined by professional educators, not by students so education today is still, as much as ever
a matter of inculcation.
In conclusion, I learnt about a school named SUDBURY VALLEY
SCHOOL in which children are left to discover and learn things on their own
without any instruction. The school is built on these three basic tenets;
education freedom, democratic governance and personal responsibility and their
graduates show to be fulfilled, effective adults in their larger culture.
So now the question is; does our world need robots or free
thinking intellectuals?
