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 childÂ’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 playessentially 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. ChildrenÂ’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 childÂ’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 childrens creativity and need for exploration were so powerful that they can never be fully beaten out of a child.