Colonial Influence on American Education Today - Essay Example

Running Head Colonial Influence on American Education Today Colonial Influence on American Education Today Colonial Influence on American Education Today Colonial period had a great impact on all spheres of life including politics and education, social and economic relations. The remarkable feature of American education is that immigrants brought the western education system and its main principles to America. Colonial influence on modern American education is crucial because immigrants formed education system and brought unique religious and philosophical beliefs and values to the education system. The importance of education is explained by the fact that the nation depends upon its schools and colleges to furnish this intellectual training to its citizenry as a whole. Society has no other institutions upon which it can rely in the matter. If schools and colleges do not emphasize rigorous intellectual training, there will be none. This is not true of the other services that educational agencies may incidentally render. It is well for the schools to pay attention to public health, for example, but if they are unable to do so, the health of the nation will not go uncared for. Puritan values and beliefs became a part of education system and pedagogy. The crucial doctrinal issues of the century concerned questions about human nature and God's grace. In what manner did God communicate redemption How might an individual transcend sin and find salvation How did God elevate a soul into union with Himself Protestants from the beginning rejected Catholic teaching concerning a "divine spark" that survived the Fall and remained unblemished by Original Sin. Following Stubblefield and Keane (1994) puritan philosophies reflected in education and brought religious values to curriculum. Freedom was indeed one pole of the Puritan axis, but order was the other. The new order was to be rooted in biblical authority and precedent. If any people ever were, Puritans were people of the Book. The new order they created, and the world view that undergirded it, was meticulously scriptural in nature. "Puritans rejected liturgical traditions, no matter how venerable, that had no discernible basis in the Bible, replacing them with worship and devotional practices seen as more soundly scriptural" (Karier 1991, 34). At the same time, as we have seen, some devotional themes and methods with slight scriptural foundation were so strong that they were able to survive the transition from medieval Catholicism to New England Puritanism. New England's participation in this moral system is well known and persisted through the century even as the society itself changed. Education system introduced religious education and teaching as the main subject studied during the colonial era. Today, religion is still of vital importance for private and public schools. Puritan philosophy brought to education ideas of sin and guilt, honesty and patience (Karier 1991). Puritan emphasis on literacy, based on the Protestant insistence that individuals must be able to read their own Bibles, was a further iconoclastic and socially divisive element in Puritan devotion. Puritanism encouraged believers to read, meditate, and pray on their own. Meditation focused on personal experience, and prayers expressed personal hopes and concerns. Puritanism was not only a lay movement; like radical religious movements in Europe generally, it was also a women's movement. In their writing, Gordon and Gordon (2002) state that women formed the "front line in defense of their preachers" under persecution in England, and women emerged as leaders and "prophets" among radical groups throughout the Civil War. The first Latin grammar school was opened in 1635 for high social classes including clergy and state officials. The preliminary grammar or Latin curriculum also became compartmentalized, entrusted to specialist grammar teachers. The effect of this new specialization of education is well known at the university level: scholasticism became ever more preoccupied with the philosophical, scientific and, eventually, theological disciplines. However, there has been little attention devoted to the collateral effects of these developments on the grammar schools (Gordon and Gordon 2002). Modern education is based on this curriculum emphasizing the role of languages and humanitarian studies. For instance, Boston Latin School is the oldest in America. The curriculum of the school is centered in the humanities, its founders sharing with the ancient Greeks the belief that the only good things are the goods of the soul. Edmund Burke referred to America as exemplifying the "dissidence of dissent." From its beginning, Boston Latin School has taught its scholars dissent with responsibility and has persistently encouraged such dissent (Boston Latin School: History 2007). The most unique feature of the school curriculum was the teaching of Latin prose writing: Ciceronian style was introduced into the classroom. And yet even at this level, the overall curricular structure remained, as it had been in the earlier period, based on a progression from natural and simple language to artificial and ornate style; pupils continued to learn two kinds of prose a school, with medieval Latin remaining the point of departure for stylistic ornament and artifice. "Advanced training in classical languages, history and literature -- was offered at the Friends Public School, which still operates in Philadelphia as the William Penn Charter School. The school was free to the poor, but parents who could were required to pay tuition" (The Colonial Period 2005). Today, the disciplined mind is what education at every level should strive to produce. It continued by undermining the discipline of language, debasing speech until it could no longer be the vehicle of independent thought. The sheer power of disciplined thought is revealed in practically all the great intellectual and technological advances that the human race has made. The ability of the man of disciplined mind to direct this power effectively upon problems for which he has not been specifically trained is proved by instances without number. "Classical" education implied much more than an education in which the masterpieces of antiquity were respected and studied. It meant an education founded on the belief that the classical languages and literatures enshrined most of the techniques of thought, most of the standards of excellence, and much of the actual knowledge needful to an educated man. "The attempt to maintain this conception of education ran directly athwart many of the most powerful intellectual forces that previous centuries had been generating" (Gatto 2001, 23). The tradition-bound "classical" curriculum allowed no real place in formal education for the natural sciences, which for two centuries had been demonstrating their intellectual cogency in competition with the forms of reasoning developed in classical antiquity. In the second place, it gravely impeded the application to modern times and conditions of the great disciplines like history and politics and jurisprudence and geography which had been developed by Greek and Roman thinkers but which there was no reason to confine to Greek and Roman data (Stubblefield and Keane 1994). Common schools were important institutions which influenced modern education system. The first school was opened in Virginia in 1635 but the majority of children received home education. Since 1870 the total enrollment of the public schools has not quite quadrupled, but expenditures and investment have each increased some ninetyfold. Compared with the average pupil of the early period, the average child now attends school twice as many days each year. Furthermore, over the past eighty years even the number of teachers has managed to increase somewhat more rapidly than enrollment. Today, the American public schools, working in close harmony with the colleges, universities, and professional schools, have the same responsibility of training scientists, physicians, scholars, engineers, and other professional men. "Harvard College was founded in 1636 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Near the end of the century, the College of William and Mary was established in Virginia. A few years later, the Collegiate School of Connecticut, later to become Yale College, was chartered" (The Colonial Period 2005). Public education in the United States has gone through a period of enormously rapid expansion. For several past generations it has been necessary to think of public education primarily in quantitative terms. The facilities at the outset were hopelessly inadequate for doing the kind of educational job which the United States required. American schools had to catch up with the rapid territorial expansion and the rapid increase in population that had occurred and was occurring. At the same time, the schools had to offer more prolonged and extensive training to meet the increasingly heavy intellectual demands of an industrialized and urbanized society (Gatto 2001). On top of all this, the schools had to enlarge their facilities to carry out the democratic ideal of making educational opportunity available to every class of the population. Under such circumstances a preoccupation with sheer physical expansion was inevitable (Stubblefield and Keane 1994). Every child brought into school or every year added to the education of a child already in school could be accounted a net gain, without inquiring too particularly into the quality of the training the child obtained. Until the most immediate and pressing quantitative problems received an approximately adequate solution, the question of quality could wait (Gordon and Gordon 2002). Colonial education system shaped the structure of modern education. For instance, as a public school, its responsibility is to offer such training to every young man or woman who has the capacity and the will to apply intellectual means to the solution of the problems that confront him. And as an agency of general influence in society, its duty is to encourage intellectual effort and respect for intellectual effort on the part of every citizen, whatever his background or occupation. "An educational institution contributes in a specialized, not an all-inclusive, way to advancing the welfare of men and women" (Stubblefield and Keane 1994, 58). Schooling is better than apprenticeship as preparation for a job, but only if it leads a man to grasp the theory behind the practice. Physical education makes sense in the school, but only if it is linked with a knowledge of physiology. Notre Dame schools empathizes parents involvement in education process. Tutorial system was aimed to provide training in certain disciplines and had a great impact on modern vocational training. A school that sticks to its job of intellectual training was not thereby indifferent to the vocational needs of its students, to their physical development, to their moral conduct, or to their emotional and mental health (Gordon and Gordon 2002). Such a school merely recognized that it had to deal with these matters within the context provided by its own characteristic activity. Modern education system can make a more effective contribution to vocational training, to physical education, and to ethics than if it cherishes the delusion that it is home, church, workshop, and doctor's office rolled into one. Throughout history intellectual disciplines have rightly been considered fundamental in education for practical life and for citizenship, as well as in training for the professions. The modern world has made them more vital than ever. Every vocation has grown more complicated. The artisan of an earlier century might make his way in the world even though illiterate and all but unlearned in elementary arithmetic. Today even the simplest trades require much more. The responsibilities of the citizen, too, have grown more exacting year by year. Intelligent citizenship does not mean merely a simple faith in American democracy (Stubblefield and Keane 1994). It calls for a thorough knowledge of political principles and institutions, of history, and of economics. It demands a clear understanding of the various sciences, for the voter must help decide public policy on such intricate matters as the development and control of atomic energy. Above all, intelligent citizenship requires an ability to read, to understand, and to test the logic of arguments far more complicated than any hitherto addressed to the public at large (Cremin 1974). The school does bring together almost all the children of the community. Consequently many health and welfare services can reach children and their families most conveniently through the school. Instructions concerning health and safety precautions, including emergency and civil-defense arrangements, can be disseminated most efficiently through the school. The school ordinarily conducts a program of social activities, and some of the niceties of social intercourse can receive unobtrusive attention in connection therewith. So far as the school is able to do so without interfering with its essential programs of study, it should make its facilities available for these services (Cremin 1974). The vast alteration of the school curriculum that occurred in the nineteenth century was not primarily a response to the changes in intellectual life that took place within the limits of that century. It was an adjustment to intellectual and social developments that had been in process for several centuries at the very least (The Colonial Period 2005). The schools were catching up with the scientific advances of the nineteenth century, of course, but more than that, they were catching up with the implication of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. They were assimilating the anti-theological, rationalistic, utilitarian spirit that became fully articulate in the eighteenth century, but that had been growing for centuries before. When the schools accepted modern languages, literatures, and history, they were not so much bringing the nineteenth century into the classroom as taking belated account of the cultural nationalism that had been gathering strength ever since the rise of vernacular (Gatto 2001) Knowledge does, of course, become more abstract and reasoning more intricate as one proceeds farther into each of the fields of science and learning. But this does not mean that knowledge becomes less practical or less applicable to human affairs as it advances. Also, it becomes more practical because it becomes more powerful. A formula is abstract not because it has lost touch with facts but because it compresses so many facts into small compass that only an abstract statement can sum them up (Stubblefield and Keane 1994). Simple forms of knowledge can accomplish simple tasks; complex forms of knowledge can accomplish complex tasks. The experimental sciences won recognition as fundamental and indispensable disciplines in a modern program of liberal study. History was emancipated from its essentially classical orientation and historians brought all times and places within the purview of classroom instruction and seminar research. The various social sciences emerged as separate disciplines, and made the analysis of contemporary society a legitimate academic enterprise (Gordon and Gordon 2002). Similar to the colonial period, training in ethics is a responsibility of the school, but it meets that responsibility, not by offering a course in "How to be good," but by seeing to it that morality permeates the regular activities of the school (Karier, 1991). Modern languages and literatures became the subject of study as intensive as that bestowed upon the ancient classics. The utilitarian applications of theoretical knowledge receive full academic recognition in professional curricula for engineering and agriculture and in the vastly expanded programs of training. States integrated different education programs to promote the understanding of civilization in its various aspects: historical, literary, philosophical, sthetic, economic, political, diplomatic, sociological. Based on century old traditions, modern education permits students to complete their fundamental intellectual training in an atmosphere of greater freedom. Students move gradually toward specialization, mingling the while and exchanging ideas with comrades whose intellectual paths are beginning to diverge. Modern American education begins with a courageous assertion that all the various subjects and disciplines in the curriculum are not of equal value. Some disciplines are fundamental, in the sense that they represent essential ways of thinking, which can be generalized and applied to a wide range of intellectual problems. Other disciplines, though equal in intellectual potency, are somewhat less central to the purposes of liberal education, either because they can be studied only after the fundamental disciplines are mastered, or because they represent highly specialized intellectual techniques, restricted in their range of applicability. Similar to colonial schools, modern educational establishments have a unique character of their own. References 1. Boston Latin School: History (2007). Retrieved 01 June 2007, from http://www.bls.org/cfml/l3tmpl_history.cfm 2. The Colonial Period (2005). Chapter 2. An Outline of American History Retrieved 01 June 2007, from http://stockholm.usembassy.gov/usis/history/chapter2.html 3. Gatto, J.T. (2001). The Underground History of American Education. Oxford. 4. Gordon, E.E., Gordon, E.H. (2002). Literacy in America: Historic Journey and Contemporary Solutions. Praeger Paperback. 5. Cremin, L.A. (Feb., 1974). American Education, The Colonial Experience 1607-1783. British Journal of Educational Studies, 22 (1), 109-111. 6. Karier, C.J. (1991). The Individual, Society, and Education: A History of American Educational Ideas. University of Illinois Press. 7. Stubblefield, H.W., Keane, P. (1994). Adult Education in the American Experience: From the Colonial Period to the Present. Jossey-Bass. Read More