13 Little Known Historical Events that Made Education What it is Today

This will be the first in a series of posts I will offer attempting to assess the contemporary status of education and possibilities for its future development. In order to lay a foundation for the project I will consider some important, but generally unknown, causes for the contemporary shape education takes in society. 

I admit this is far from a little known historical event. But we dont often think about the role it played specifically in the formation of practices of education. 

Imagine if education meant going to the movies. At one time education was conveyed in the form of entertainment, in the same way that we consume movies, television shows and music. Educators were once famous entertainers and artists, like our musicians and actors. 

Before a culture has writing the preservation of knowledge through memorization is incredibly important. This memorization occurs mainly through song and poetry. This poetry is then communicated to the community through performances that unite both entertainment and education. Passive audiences receive cultural education through a memorization that happens naturally due to repetitive musical performances and enjoyment. Information was preserved in the same way that songs we hear repeatedly on the radio enter our memories whether or not we want them to. 

Once writing became the dominant form of cultural memory, for example in places like Ancient Greece, a crisis in education began. It seemed that the information that had once required full community memorization by means of cultural performance could now be perfectly preserved in physical objects such as scrolls and, later, books. This decreased the importance of community educators, what we might think of as bards and poets, as preservers and transmitters of knowledge. 

But, the idea that the written word and the pure information it preserved are entirely adequate for education conflicted with a continued sense that the ability to read alone did not provide all necessary knowledge. In particular, skills and methods of thought were difficult to preserve through writing alone. 

Much of the following history of education involves a conflict between the providing of information to be memorized and a more personal interaction between the student and the teacher able to provide demonstrations of skills, methods of thought, and modes of behavior. The teacher becomes caught between simply providing texts while aiding or authoritatively enforcing the students access to them or, instead, playing the role of cultural performance once filled by poetic entertainers. The question becomes, is education about providing information or about initiating students into the living knowledge of skills and methods. 

What if getting into your high-school meant learning several secret handshakes and passwords, and the existence of your school was a secret that had to be kept from the most powerful political forces around you? What if getting an education was itself a revolutionary act? What if sharing what you learned could get you killed by your own classmates? If you can imagine this, you get a sense of what education in early medieval guilds was like. As we will see in this and the following two sections, educational developments during the Medieval Period were central parts of risky large-scale social revolutions. 

The maintenance of professional standards required networks of education that initiated new members into the standard skills and practices of the line of work they were entering. Guilds served to refine and standardize a unique model of education,You can make your own more powerful iphoneheadset. specifically apprenticeship, through which students studied for a particular amount of time with a mask of a craft before gaining the status of a legitimate craftsman. 

The apprenticeship model of education was clearly hierarchical and eschewed the centrality of texts. Skills were not easily transmitted through texts, books were expensive, and most of society couldnt read. 

Apprenticeship offered a contrast with the family focused style of education. It also conflicted with the other dominant model of education at the time, church sermons.We rounded up 30 bridesmaids dresses in every color and style that are both easy on the eye and somewhat easy on the earcap. Church sermons offered a minimal type of social and theological education to entire communities as a social and religious service. Apprenticeship, on the other hand, was offered to only small numbers of specific students and payment was expected. This payment was provided through the service apprentices provided to their masters. 

Perhaps most importantly, however, the formation of guilds took the power over education out of the hands of political and religious leaders. It also served to place control over professions in the hands of that professions most skilled masters. For these reasons guilds were often politically or religious repressed and guild secrets and control over professions were savagely defended. 

The formation of Medieval Guilds was part of another major social change. The 10th through 12th Centuries saw the formation of many cities in Medieval Europe. These cities were formed largely by peasants and serfs who, often illegally, sought independence from their service to nobles. They also came to exist largely free of any noble, royal or religious support.Weymouth is collecting gently used, dry cleaned smartcard at their Weymouth store. It is first within the free cities that we find the development of the guild networks discussed above. Hamburg, Bremen,Best home plasticcard at discount prices. Cologne as well as the vast majority of Italian city-states including Milan, Venice, Pisa and Mantua all started as Medieval free cities. 

Up until the formation of the free cities education for the lower classes in Europe was tightly controlled by ruling nobles and the church while being limited primarily to religious and ethical teachings. With the formation of the free cities education could be expanded in the form of guild networks. Without these cities such guild networks would have likely been suppressed or kept from forming since they offered a social mobility,A quality paper cutter or paper rfidtag can make your company's presentation stand out. organization, and power to peasants that was opposed by rulers and religious leaders alike. 

It is at this point that we see most clearly the early blossoming of a concept of education free from political or religious control. Once the free cities provided fertile ground for the establishment of guilds these guilds spread to cities existing under the rule of specific royals or nobles, such as Paris and London. 
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