Last night in class as we were discussing Friere’s Banking model of education, someone wondered why this was just becoming an issue in the sixties and seventies. It seems hard to believe that no one had really thought to question the authority teachers/ instructors/ professors until this time.
It does seem to make sense though, when one considers the lack of universal education. Education was not a given until the relatively recent past. Women, the poor, even just anyone outside the upper elite wouldn’t have really had much of an opportunity for education. So, why would the upperclass elite sons of the aristocracy question what to them appeared as the greatest system on earth? The view would have looked pretty good from up there and if they hoped to stay there, why should they seek to change it?
And perhaps they did have a lively system of debate/ questioning within the confines of the elite tutor/ student relationship. Perhaps it was only when these professors and instructors were leaving these elite estates (which were often private home-schooling situations) for the slums of the city, and teaching the relatively ignorant poor that their professorial egos really got the best of them. Perhaps only then did they begin to see themselves as members of the intellectual elite bestowing their godlike knowledge on the ignorant savages of public education.
The universalization of school attendance may have led the way, and only later on, did the teaching model – which had worked well with small or individual, homogenous groups, but not so well with new groups entering the classroom – begin to catch up.
I had a similar thought yesterday. When marginalized populations do get access to (or fight their way into) various systems they were previously excluded from (ones that have historically and still currently hold them back), it makes a ton of sense that someone might not want to rock the boat.
That sucks, of course, but it does make sense.
You’re right about this. It does take some time to catch up. If you think about it in terms of discourse acquisition, people/generations brought up in the dominant systems (of culture, education, economics) often need to “acquire the language” before they can fully participate. (This sucks, also.)
It’s odd to look back and feel like it was a million years ago, but it is recent and certainly not over. In general, we still have lots of unfounded reverence for authority figures.
I think another reason why the spread of education has occurred at such a slow pace is that it’s expensive and a luxury. Farmers don’t need to know how to read, write, do mathematics, learn about the theory of the atom because it has no bearing on their financial status. From the self-interested perspective of farmers, time spent educating themselves is time lost not plowing fields and feeding their families. So, although the aristocracies of the past certainly didn’t pain themselves in any serious way to spread education to the masses, I don’t think the masses really cared that much about education either.
The information age has changed everything. Now people need education in order to do anything. The pragmatic value of education has drastic effects on the daily lives of everyone in an information based economy.