Whist researching my topic, I wanted some background noise to help me concentrate. So, I turned on my TV and started to play one of my favorite shows, ‘Black Mirror’. The episodes are all individually casted and have unique storylines. The topics on the show explore relevant topics, but with exaggerated storyline to create an unease about our modern society. As I was endlessly sifting through information and glancing up at my screen, I realized that the mind warping ideas coming from the utopian TV show matched the ideas in my research. I quickly made connections ad saw exactly how I would explain the education system. At first, I thought I would create and describe an ‘episode’ of the series about high school, I would exaggerate the circumstances and create something that would make people think of high school with the skeptical perspective I sat at my computer, wondering how to create this story. Then I realized I don’t have to. When spoken about as a skeleton, school sounds morbid and cruel. So, instead of creating and altering our realities, I will be dry and right to the point. The circumstances of our school system appeal for themselves. The school system is based on things like our shameful history, standardized testing and current political problems resulting in funding cuts. Teens relinquish all control that we have. We trust that for a concept like school to be enforced all over the world it must be effective, there must be science behind it or logic. To understand how and why we’ve created this system we must remember that this is not a product of logic or science or psychology, it was a product of history.
I believe we need to view the problem in a futuristic mindset to find a solution, but to understand schools, we must view them in historical perspective. When we see that children everywhere are required by law to go to school, that almost all schools are structured in the same way, and that our society goes to a great deal of trouble and expense to provide such schools, we tend naturally to assume that there must be some good, logical reason. If we want to understand why standard schools are what they are, we have to abandon the idea that they are products of logic or scientific insight. They are, instead, products of history. As I previously said, schooling as it exists today, only makes sense if we view it from a historical perspective. As a step toward explaining why schools exist, I will in a nutshell explain the history of education.
For hundreds of thousands of years, children educated themselves. They learned through self-directed play and exploration. If you look at schools in relation to the history of our species, they are very recent institutions. For hundreds of thousands of years, before the advent of agriculture, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Children in hunter-gatherer cultures learned what they needed to know to become effective competent adults through their creativity and interest. The strong drives in children to play and explore presumably came about, during our evolution as hunter-gatherers. Adults in hunter-gatherer cultures allowed children almost unlimited freedom to play and explore on their own because they recognized creative activities are child’s natural ways of learning. The rise of agriculture and industry forced children to become laborers. Play, creativity and exploration were suppressed. Creativity, which had once been a virtue, became a vice beaten out of children. Hunter-gatherers saw did not see labor as a job or ‘work’, so they did not distinguish between work and play—essentially all of life was understood as play. The new industry gradually changed learning from what we here from the hunter-gatherers, into something more familiar in modern day. With agriculture, people learned that mass production could allowed them to make more money. This large-scale farming required long hours of relatively unskilled, repetitive labor, most of which could be done by children. Children’s lives changed gradually from the free pursuit of their own interests to increasingly more time spent at work. With the rise of a new bourgeoisie class, child labor gradually subsided, but this did not immediately improve the lives of most children. Business owners cheap needed laborers. They felt they could profit by extracting as much work from them as possible with very little compensation. During this time period the extent of a child’s education was squashing their willfulness in order to make them good laborers. A good child was an obedient child, who suppressed his or her urge to play and explore. A good child blindly carried out the orders of adult masters. But human instincts are very strong, the children’s creativity and need for exploration were so powerful that they can never be fully beaten out of a child.
The idea of universal, compulsory education arose and gradually spread. Some would be religious, and some public. As industry became somewhat more automated, the need for child labor declined in some parts of the world. The idea began to spread that childhood should be a time for learning. The idea and practice of universal, compulsory public education developed gradually in Europe, from the early 16th century on into the 19th. It was an idea that had many supporters, who all had their own ideas concerning the lessons that children should learn. Employers in industry saw schooling as a way to create better workers. To them, the most crucial lessons were punctuality, following directions, tolerance for long hours of tedious work, and a minimal ability to read and write. From their point of view, the duller or lest explorative the subjects taught in schools, the better. Although the traits to make a good laborer were most important, children still learned subjects such as Latin and mathematics, nobody believed that children left to their own devices, even in a rich setting for learning. They felt as though children had to learn just the lessons that they, as adults, deemed to be so important. All of them saw schooling as the implanting of certain truths and ways of thinking into children’s minds. The only known method of education, then as well as now, is forced repetition and testing for memory of what was repeated. With the rise of schooling, people began to think of learning as children’s work. The same power-assertive methods that had been used to make children work in fields and factories were quite naturally transferred to the classroom. Repetition and memorization of lessons is tedious work for children, whose instincts urge them constantly to play freely and explore the world on their own. Just as children do not adapt readily to laboring in fields and factories, they did not adapt readily to schooling. This was no surprise to the adults involved. By this point in history, the idea that children’s own willfulness had any value was pretty well forgotten. Everyone assumed that to make children learn in school the children’s willfulness would have to be beaten out of them. Punishments of all sorts were seen as essential to the educational process. In some schools, children were permitted certain periods of play (recess), but play was not considered to be a vehicle of learning. In the classroom, play was the enemy of learning.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, public schooling gradually evolved toward what we all recognize today as conventional schooling. The methods of discipline became more humane, or at least less corporal, the lessons became more secular, the curriculum expanded, as knowledge expanded, to include an ever-growing list of subjects, and the number of hours, days, and years of compulsory schooling increased continuously. School gradually replaced fieldwork, factory work, and domestic chores as the child’s primary job. Just as adults put in their eight-hour day at their place of employment, children today put in their six-hour day at school, plus another hour or more of homework, and often more hours of lessons outside of school. Over time, children’s lives have become increasingly defined and structured by the school curriculum. Children now are almost universally identified by their grade in school, much as adults are identified by their job or career.
Schools today are much less harsh than they were, but certain premises about the nature of learning remain unchanged: learning is hard work, it is something that children must be forced to do, not something that will happen naturally through children’s self-chosen activities. The specific lessons that children must learn are determined by professional educators, not by children, so education today is still, as much as ever, a matter of inculcation (though educators tend to avoid that term and use, falsely, terms like ‘discovery’).
Clever educators today might use ‘play’ as a tool to get children to enjoy some of their lessons, and children might be allowed some free playtime at recess (though even this is decreasing in very recent times), but the children’s own play is certainly understood as inadequate as a foundation for education. Children whose drive to play is so strong that they can’t sit still for lessons are no longer beaten, instead, they are medicated and pitied for a basic human reaction. School today is the place where all children learn the distinction that hunter-gatherers never knew—the distinction between work and play. The teacher says, ‘You must do your work and then you can play’. Clearly, according to this message, work, which encompasses all of school learning, is something that one does not want to do but must, and play, which is everything that one wants to do, has relatively little value. That, perhaps, is the leading lesson of our method of schooling. If children learn nothing else in school, they learn the difference between work and play.
A person who historically played a huge role in developing the education system in Canada was Egerton Ryerson. He was greatly involved in creating a wide spread uniform education system in Ontario. Ryerson helped found the Upper Canada Academy in Cobourg in the 1830s, which was one of the first school in Ontario. Ryerson also fought for many secularization reforms to keep power and influence away from any one church, which is ironic for his choices later in his career. Such secularization also led to the widening of the school system. The current Governor General asked him to become Chief Superintendent of Education for Upper Canada in 1844. It is in this role that Ryerson made his historical mark. He is credited with the creation of the modern textbook. Also, he fought for school to be free to the public. While Egerton Ryerson supported free and compulsory education, he also believed in different systems of education for white children and Aboriginal children. These beliefs played a role in the establishment of what became the residential school system that has had such a devastating impact on First Nations, Metis and Inuit people across Canada. Along with this he also believed girls shouldn’t be educated past 6th grade as their roles in society are to be wives and homemakers.
Next, I will transfer from the origins of the system to current application methods, every teen’s nightmare, standardized testing. School has always relied on standardized testing. The Industrial Revolution and the movement to increased schooling where students were what really advanced the use of standardized testing. Children were being moved out of the work force and into schools. One of the easiest and the cheapest way to test large numbers of those children was with a standardized exam. In the U.S. Alfred Binet (1857-1911) and Theodore Simon (1872-1961) developed what is now commonly known as an IQ Test, beginning in the late 1800s and culminating with the Binet-Simon scale in 1905. These intelligence tests were created in response to the wanting of the French government to develop special education classes for students who were not benefiting from the newly instituted regular compulsory education program. The tests tried to identify students who needed focused education in order to maximize their education. These standardized tests were an attempt to streamline education so that society would gain maximum benefit from each citizen. Historians suggest by World War I every day standardized testing was the only method of assessment. Although Americans were creating tests like the SAT tests, Canadians did not have a big exam like that until the 1960s. Alberta was the first province in Canada to create a big exam. Their first exam was comparable to modern EQAO. The test was given to 3th, 6th, and 9th grades. Historians suggest that Alberta’s introduction of achievement testing was done in response to a worldwide wave of educational reform that wanted more accountability and structure in education. At the 12th grade level, diploma exams were reinstated in 1984, after being removed for several years. These tests are the heart of the school system, yet there are hundreds of studies proving them ineffective. There are so many variables to be considered including giving an advantage those who can afford test prep, using arbitrary, subjectively-set pass-fail cut scores. They can reduce teacher creativity and the appeal of teaching as a profession, create unnecessary stress and negative attitudes toward schooling, waste the vast, creative potential of human variability, and even penalize test-takers who think in nonstandard ways. Speaking personally, I feel as though test scores do not reflect my overall intelligence.
Ontario’s education system has had its ups and downs, the most recent change is thanks to a politician named Doug Ford. His recent cuts are ironically labelled ‘Education That Works for You’. His plan focuses on modernizing learning, modernizing health and physical education. ‘Modernizing classrooms’ means improving broadband Internet access, requiring high school students to take a minimum of four online courses (up to now, online courses were typically optional), and making ‘sustainable’ cuts to grants for student needs which covers costs for things like classroom supplies and Indigenous language programs. It also means increasing class sizes—under the plan, average class size for grades four through eight will rise from 25 to 27, while average class size for grades nine through 12 will jump from 25 to 33. As for ‘modernizing learning’, Ford’s government hopes to introduce a new four-year math plan that will increase online resources and require new teachers to pass a math knowledge test to become Ontario College of Teachers (OCT) certified—seemingly regardless of their subject expertise. Meaning every teacher must pass this math test no matter their subject. The health and physical education portion of the plan is step in the right direction, they plan to undo the decision they made summer of 2018, which was to revert schools to the 1998 curriculum, including sex education after much backlash (the 1998 curriculum didn’t cover consent, online communication, or LGBTQ2+ identities). The final version looks more similar to the 2015 curriculum and covers consent, online safety, gender identity and expression. That said, certain topics will now be covered in grade 8, not grade 6. But Ford has neglected education on mental health, the farthest they will go is adding a class on what a healthy family looks like to help kids in abusive situations. They will also be adding the risks of opioids and vaping to the curriculum. This prime example of how the school system isn’t setup to help students succeed.
The picture I’ve painted in this paper should open your mind the way an episode of ‘Black Mirror’ does. It should show you that although history is important, it’s nothing unless we learn from it. It should show that a test doesn’t determine whether someone is or isn’t intelligent, and lastly should that, our future is depended on whether or not we change our ways. I could scare you by crafting a story. Using fiction to plant a seed in your mind, instead I used facts and knowledge to hopefully, invoke change. In the world of Charlie Brooker, my story isn’t a warning, change is inevitable, the question is when.