Education in the Modern Era
Until the time of the Renaissance in the West (starting around 1400), most educational institutions around the world had a heavily religious patina. The leaders, the funding, and the curricula were dominated by the regnant theology, be it Catholic, Islamic, Jewish, or polytheistic. And except for a tiny elite, education typically stopped with the mastery of basic literacies as defined over the centuries. But with the rediscovery of the knowledge of the ancients (chiefly Greek and Roman), the rise of merchant classes, the exploration of the world beyond Europe and the Middle East, and, most importantly, the invention of printing, a slow but seemingly inexorable trend began toward the secularization and the universalization of education, at least for young people in the years before adolescence.
Accordingly, in most parts of the world, even today, the broad outlines of teaching and learning are strikingly similar to one another. Formal schooling begins at age five to seven; the preceding years include, at most, introduction to the forms of literacy, experience of working and playing with peers, and an inculcation of routine in a setting apart from the more familiar terrain of home, the streets, the playground, the open fields, or the forest/mountain/coast line. Formal pre-schools are a quite recent phenomenon, though they are becoming standard practice in several European countries.
In the early years of formal schooling, teachers—largely women—introduce students to reading, writing, and elementary arithmetic. This introduction is done in part by modeling and in part by imitation, with some oral recitation, and some exercises in workbooks or worksheets. There is increasing recognition of individual differences, including specific learning deficits. There may also be some adjustment in both curriculum and pedagogy for these varying constituencies. But by and large, the model followed is that of “uniform schooling.” That is, there is a single way of teaching, a single way of studying and learning (chiefly copying and giving content back to the teacher), and a single way of assessing learning (through some kind of oral and/or written examination). Uniform schooling reflects both fairness and efficiency. It appears fair to treat all children in the same way; and it is also efficient, given classes of 20, 30, or even 60 charges in one room, sometimes arrayed by age, sometimes decidedly heterogeneous in composition.
In much of the world, schooling still ends with the mastery of the literacies. But in developed societies and in rapidly developing societies, pre-adolescents and adolescents are exposed to those subject matters or disciplines that are deemed most important for work and citizenship in the modern world. Almost everywhere, the curriculum features mathematics (algebra, geometry, and perhaps calculus or pre-calculus); science (with physics, chemistry, and biology the chief sciences); history or social studies (typically a focus on the history of the country or region, with a smattering of world history and culture and, possibly, some attention to current events); and in diminishing order of popularity, other sciences (e.g., geology, astronomy, social sciences like economics or psychology), geography, civics, physical education, and one or more art forms. In most societies, there is little attention to extracurricular activities (the United States, with its focus on sports, arts, publications, student government is an outlier here); budding scholars are expected to study hard, often aided by parents or by tutors if sufficient financial resources are available.
It would be an exaggeration to claim that formal education takes place without attention to what has been learned about the processes of successful learning, such as insights into student motivation, study habits, strategies, metacognition, and other approaches obtained from experience, or, more recently and systematically, from the psychological and cognitive sciences. But it would probably be accurate to say that such accumulated knowledge is used only spottily and sporadically in most parts of the world. Education—teaching and learning—changes very slowly. The texts, the teacher-dominated lectures, the stylized interaction between students and teachers, the examinations, the graduation requirements, are not that different from those that could have been observed a century ago. And given the previous changes in communication media—telegraph, telephone, radio, television, film, film strips—it is notable how little they have infiltrated into the core of the educational process. Whether the classroom and, more broadly, the learning process will prove equally unaffected by the new digital media—interactive and Internet-enabled technologies such as personal computers, mobile phones, game consoles, and the virtual spaces afforded by them—is open to question.
In most education around the world, the classroom is pointedly teacher-centric. The teacher is assumed to be the center, the fount, of all knowledge; the students are perceived as relatively empty vessels, into whom skills and information are to be deposited as efficiently and correctly as possible. Students are assumed to differ in native ability, and the purpose of school is to discover those destined to be quick learners, to give them the goods to advance, and to educate minimally, or even cut as losses, those who are not gifted in learning. The IQ test was devised as an instrument that could aid in this culling purpose (Gardner 1983; Gould 1981).
To be sure, counterthemes or counterforces have existed previously. Primary education has a strong strand, dating back to Pestalozzi and Froebel and culminating in Montessori, Dewey, and Malaguzzi, that emphasizes hands-on learning and the construction of knowledge by the child. Relatedly, though not identically, there has been recognition that not all children learn in the same way or benefit from the same kind of educational milieus. Progressive educators in Europe and the United States have tried, with some success, to draw on these ideas for later education (Aikin 1942; Bruner 1960, 1995; Cremin 1988; Dewey 1998, 2004). Yet, nowhere are these ideas dominant. Indeed, until today, one might say that the European classroom models of the 19th century continue to hold sway: Teachers give out information, students are expected to master it with little help, and the awards of the culture during the years of school go to those who can crack the various literate and disciplinary codes.
Education is changing at a pace which nobody can imagine , adopting new techniques in teaching is must .