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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