The Fresco At Herculaneum
Sparta, Athens’ neighbor, was a horse of a
different color. Society in Sparta was organized around the concept of
cradle-to-grave formal training. The whole state was a universal
schoolhouse, official prescriptions for the population filled every
waking minute and the family was employed as a convenience for the
state. Sparta’s public political arrangements were an elaborate sham,
organized nominally around an executive branch with two legislative
bodies, but ultimate decision-making was in the hands of ephors, a
small elite who conducted state policy among themselves. The practical
aspect of imitation democracy figures strongly in the thought of later
social thinkers such as Machiavelli (1532) and Hobbes (1651), as well as
in minds nearer our own time who had influence on the shape of American
forced schooling.
Spartan ideas of management came to American
consciousness through classical studies in early schooling, through
churches, and also through interest in the German military state of
Prussia, which consciously modeled itself after Sparta. As the
nineteenth century entered its final decades American university
training came to follow the Prussian/Spartan model. Service to business
and the political state became the most important reason for college and
university existence after 1910. No longer was college primarily about
developing mind and character in the young. Instead, it was about
molding those things as instruments for use by others. Here is an
important clue to the philosophical split which informed the foundation
of modern schooling and to an important extent still does: small
farmers, crafts folk, trades people, little town and city professionals,
little industrialists, and older manorial interests took a part of
their dream of America from democratic Athens or from republican Rome
(not the Rome of the emperors); this comprised a significant proportion
of ordinary America. But new urban managerial elites pointed to a future
based on Spartan outlook.
When the instructional system of Athens
transferred to Imperial Rome, a few schools we would recognize began to
appear. The familiar punishment practices of colonial America can be
found anticipated vividly in the famous fresco at Herculaneum, showing a
Roman schoolboy being held by two of his classmates while the master
advances, carrying a long whip. Roman schools must have started
discipline early in the morning for we find the poet Martial cursing a
school for waking him up at cock’s crow with shouts and beatings; Horace
immortalizes pedagogue Orbilius for whipping a love of old poets into
him. But we shouldn’t be misled by these school references. What few
schools there were in Rome were for boys of prosperous classes, and even
most of these relied upon tutors, tradition, and emulation, not school.
The word pedagogue is Latin for a
specialized class of slave assigned to walk a student to the
schoolmaster; over time the slave was given additional duties, his role
was enlarged to that of drill master, a procedure memorialized in
Varro’s instituit pedagogus, docet magister: in my rusty
altar-boy Latin, The master creates instruction, the slave pounds it in.
A key to modern schooling is this: free men were never pedagogues. And
yet we often refer to the science of modern schooling as pedagogy.
The unenlightened parent who innocently brings matters of concern to
the pedagogue, whether that poor soul is called schoolteacher,
principal, or superintendent, is usually beginning a game of frustration
which will end in no fundamental change. A case of barking up the wrong
tree in a dark wood where the right tree is far away and obscure.
Pedagogy is social technology for winning
attention and cooperation (or obedience) while strings are attached to
the mind and placed in the hands of an unseen master. This may be done
holistically, with smiles, music, and light-duty simulations of
intellection, or it can be done harshly with rigorous drills and
competitive tests. The quality of self-doubt aimed for in either case is
similar.
Pedagogy is a useful concept to help us
unthread some of the mysteries of modern schooling. That it is
increasingly vital to the social order is evinced by the quiet
teacher-pay revolution that has occurred since the 1960s. As with police
work (to which pedagogy bears important similarities), school pay has
become relatively good, its hours of labor short, its job security first
rate. Contrast this with the golden years of one-room schooling where
pay was subsistence only and teachers were compelled to board around to
keep body and soul together. Yet there was no shortage then of
applicants and many sons of prominent Americans began their adult lives
as schoolteachers.
With the relative opulence of today, it would
be simple to fill teaching slots with accomplished men and women if
that were a goal. A little adjustment in what are rationally
indefensible licensing requirements would make talented people, many
performance-tested adults in their fifties and sixties, available to
teach. That there is not such fluid access is a good sign the purpose of
schooling is more than it appears. The year-in, year-out consistency
of mediocre teacher candidates demonstrates clearly that the school
institution actively seeks, nurtures, hires, and promotes the caliber of
personnel it needs.
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