Editing Education reform (section)

==History==

===Classical education===

As taught from the 18th to the 19th century, Western [[Classical education movement|classical education]] curriculums focused on concrete details like "Who?", "What?", "When?", "Where?". Unless carefully taught, large group instruction naturally neglects asking the theoretical "Why?" and "Which?" questions that can be discussed in smaller groups.

Classical education in this period also did not teach local ([[vernacular]]) languages and culture. Instead, it taught high-status ancient languages (Greek and Latin) and their cultures. This produced odd social effects in which an intellectual class might be more loyal to ancient cultures and institutions than to their native vernacular languages and their actual governing authorities.

===18th century===

====Child-study====
[[Image:Rousseau.jpg|right|thumb|190px|Jean-Jacques Rousseau]]
[[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]], father of the Child Study Movement, centered the child as an object of study.

In ''[[Emile: Or, On Education]]'', Rousseau's principal work on education lays out an [[educational program]] for a hypothetical newborn's education through adulthood.

Rousseau provided a dual critique of the educational vision outlined in Plato's Republic and that of his society in contemporary Europe. He regarded the educational methods contributing to the child's development; he held that a person could either be a man or a [[citizen]]. While Plato's plan could have brought the latter at the expense of the former, contemporary education failed at both tasks. He advocated a radical withdrawal of the child from society and an educational process that utilized the child's natural potential and curiosity, teaching the child by confronting them with simulated real-life obstacles and conditioning the child through experience rather intellectual instruction.

Rousseau ideas were rarely implemented directly, but influenced later thinkers, particularly [[Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi]] and [[Friedrich Fröbel|Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel]], the inventor of the [[kindergarten]].

====National identity====
European and Asian nations regard education as essential to maintaining national, cultural, and linguistic unity. In the late 18th century (~1779), [[Prussia]] instituted primary school reforms expressly to teach a unified version of the national language, "Hochdeutsch".

One significant reform was kindergarten whose purpose was to have the children participate in supervised activities taught by instructors who spoke the national language. The concept embraced the idea that children absorb new language skills more easily and quickly when they are young

The current model of kindergarten is reflective of the Prussian model.

In other countries, such as the [[Soviet Union]], France, Spain, and Germany, the Prussian model has dramatically improved reading and math test scores for [[linguistic minorities]].

===19th century England===
In the 19th century, before the advent of government-funded public schools, [[Protestant]] organizations established [[Charity school|Charity Schools]] to educate the lower social classes. The [[Roman Catholic Church]] and governments later adopted the model.

Designed to be inexpensive, Charity schools operated on minimal budgets and strived to serve as many needy children as possible. This led to the development of [[grammar school]]s, which primarily focused on teaching literacy, grammar, and [[bookkeeping]] skills so that the students could use books as an inexpensive resource to continue their education. ''Grammar'' was the first third of the then-prevalent system of classical education.

Educators [[Joseph Lancaster]] and [[Andrew Bell (educationalist)|Andrew Bell]] developed the [[Monitorial System|monitorial system]], also known as "mutual instruction" or the "Bell–Lancaster method". Their contemporary, educationalist and writer [[Elizabeth Hamilton (writer)|Elizabeth Hamilton]], suggested that in some important aspects the method had been "anticipated" by the [[Belfast]] schoolmaster [[David Manson (schoolmaster)|David Manson]].<ref name=":62">{{Cite book|last=Hamilton|first=Elizabeth|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-j42AQAAMAAJ&q=the+cottagers+of+glenburnie|title=The Cottagers of Glenburnie: A Tale for the Farmer's Ingle-nook|date=1837|publisher=Stirling, Kenney|pages=295–296|language=en}}</ref> In the 1760s Manson had developed a peer-teaching and monitoring system within the context of what he called a "play school" that dispensed with "the discipline of the rod".<ref name=":43">{{cite book|last1=McNeill|first1=Mary|title=The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, 1770–1866|date=1960|publisher=Allen Figgis & Co|location=Dublin|pages=36, 44}}</ref><ref name=":34">{{Cite journal|last=Marshall|first=John J.|date=1908|title=David Manson, Schoolmaster in Belfast|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/20608645|journal=Ulster Journal of Archaeology|volume=14|issue=2/3|pages=(59–72) 60–61|jstor=20608645|issn=0082-7355}}</ref> (More radically, Manson proposed the "liberty of each [child] to take the quantity [of lessons] agreeable to his inclination").<ref name=":23">{{Cite journal|last=Drennan|first=William|date=February 1811|title=Biographical Sketches of Distinguished Persons: David Manson|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/30073837|journal=The Belfast Monthly|volume=6|pages=126–132|jstor=30073837|via=}}</ref>

Lancaster, an impoverished [[Religious Society of Friends|Quaker]] during the early 19th century in London and Bell at the [[Madras School|Madras School of India]] developed this model independent of one another. However, by design, their model utilizes more advanced students as a resource to teach the less advanced students; achieving student-teacher ratios as small as 1:2 and educating more than 1000 students per adult. The lack of adult supervision at the Lancaster school resulted in the older children acting as disciplinary monitors and taskmasters.

To provide order and promote discipline the school implemented a unique internal economic system, inventing a currency called a ''Scrip.''  Although the currency was worthless in the outside world, it was created at a fixed exchange rate from a student's tuition and student's could use scrip to buy food, school supplies, books, and other items from the school store. Students could earn scrip through tutoring. To promote discipline, the school adopted a work-study model. Every job of the school was bid-for by students, with the largest bid winning. However, any student tutor could auction positions in his or her classes to earn scrip. The bids for student jobs paid for the adult supervision.[[File:Joseph Lancaster by John Hazlitt.jpg|thumb|190px|Joseph Lancaster]]
Lancaster promoted his system in a piece called Improvements in Education that spread widely throughout the English-speaking world. Lancaster schools provided a grammar-school education with fully developed internal economies for a cost per student near $40 per year in 1999 U.S. dollars. To reduce cost and motivated to save up scrip, Lancaster students rented individual pages of textbooks from the school library instead of purchasing the textbook. Student's would read aloud their pages to groups. Students commonly exchanged tutoring and paid for items and services with receipts from ''down tutoring''.{{citation needed|date=May 2021}}

The schools did not teach submission to orthodox Christian beliefs or government authorities. As a result, most English-speaking countries developed mandatory publicly paid education explicitly to keep public education in "responsible" hands. These elites said that Lancaster schools might become dishonest, provide poor education, and were not accountable to established authorities. Lancaster's supporters responded that any child could cheat given the opportunity, and that the government was not paying for the education and thus deserved no say in their composition.

Though motivated by charity, Lancaster claimed in his pamphlets to be surprised to find that he lived well on the income of his school, even while the low costs made it available to the most impoverished street children. Ironically, Lancaster lived on the charity of friends in his later life.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/subcategory/education-reform|title=Education Reform|website=www.publicschoolreview.com}}</ref>

===Modern reformist===

Although educational reform occurred on a local level at various points throughout history, the modern notion of education reform is tied with the spread of [[compulsory education]]. Economic growth and the spread of democracy raised the value of education and increased the importance of ensuring that all children and adults have access to free, high-quality, effective education. Modern education reforms are increasingly driven by a growing understanding of what works in education and how to go about successfully improving teaching and learning in schools.<ref>Whelan, Lessons Learned (2009)</ref>  However, in some cases, the reformers' goals of "high-quality education" has meant "high-intensity education", with a narrow emphasis on teaching individual, test-friendly subskills quickly, regardless of long-term outcomes, developmental appropriateness, or broader educational goals.<ref>{{Cite news|last=Kohn|first=Alfie|title=The trouble with calls for universal 'high-quality' pre-K|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/02/01/the-trouble-with-calls-for-universal-high-quality-pre-k/|access-date=2016-05-26|newspaper=The Washington Post}}</ref>

==== Horace Mann ====
[[File:Horace Mann.jpg|thumb|180px|[[Horace Mann]], regarded as the father of American public education]]
In the United States, [[Horace Mann]] (1796 – 1859) of Massachusetts used his political base and role as Secretary of the [[Massachusetts State Board of Education]] to promote public education in his home state and nationwide.<ref>Jonathan Messerli, ''Horace Mann: A Biography'' (1972)</ref>  Advocating a substantial public investment be made in education, Mann and his proponents developed a strong system of state supported [[Common Schools Act of 1871|common schools]].<ref name=":2">{{Cite journal|last1=Gruver|first1=Rebecca Brooks|last2=Kaestle|first2=Carl F.|date=1983|title=Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860|url=http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3122899|journal=Journal of the Early Republic|volume=3|issue=4|pages=501|doi=10.2307/3122899|jstor=3122899|issn=0275-1275}}</ref>'''.'''

His crusading style attracted wide middle class support. Historian [[Ellwood P. Cubberley]] asserts:
: No one did more than he to establish in the minds of the American people the conception that education should be universal, non-sectarian, free, and that its aims should be social efficiency, civic virtue, and character, rather than mere learning or the advancement of sectarian ends.<ref>Ellwood P. Cubberley, ''Public Education in the United States'' (1919)  p.  167</ref>
In 1852, Massachusetts passed a law making education mandatory.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Compulsory Education Laws: Background|url=https://www.findlaw.com/education/education-options/compulsory-education-laws-background.html|access-date=2021-04-14|website=Findlaw|language=en-US}}</ref>  This model of free, accessible education spread throughout the country and in 1917 Mississippi was the fina<big>l</big> state to adopt the law<big>.</big><ref>{{Cite web|title=History Of Education Timeline {{!}} Preceden|url=https://www.preceden.com/timelines/331186-history-of-education|access-date=2021-04-11|website=www.preceden.com|language=en}}</ref>

==== John Dewey ====
[[File:Eva Watson Schütze John Dewey.jpg|thumb|200px|John Dewey]]
[[John Dewey]], a philosopher and educator based in Chicago and New York, helped conceptualize the role of American and international education during the first four decades of the 20th century. An important member of the American [[Pragmatism|Pragmatist]] movement, he carried the subordination of knowledge to action into the educational world by arguing for [[experiential education]] that would enable children to learn theory and practice simultaneously; a well-known example is the practice of teaching elementary physics and biology to students while preparing a meal. He was a harsh critic of "dead" knowledge disconnected from practical human life.<ref>Alan Ryan, ''John Dewey and the high tide of American liberalism'' (1997).</ref>

Dewey criticized the rigidity and volume of humanistic education, and the emotional idealizations of education based on the child-study movement that had been inspired by Rousseau and those who followed him. Dewey understood that children are naturally active and curious and learn by doing.<ref>{{Citation|last=Hildebrand|first=David|title=John Dewey|date=2018|url=https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/dewey/|encyclopedia=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy|editor-last=Zalta|editor-first=Edward N.|edition=Winter 2018|publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University|access-date=2021-04-21}}</ref> Dewey's understanding of logic is presented in his work "Logic, the Theory of Inquiry" (1938). His educational philosophies were presented in "My Pedagogic Creed", ''The School and Society'', ''The Child and Curriculum'', and ''[[Democracy and Education]]'' (1916). [[Bertrand Russell]] criticized Dewey's conception of logic, saying "What he calls "logic" does not seem to me to be part of logic at all; I should call it part of psychology."<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Russell|first1=Bertrand|date=January 2, 1919|title=Professor Dewey's "Essays in Experimental Logic"|journal=The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods|volume=16|issue=1|pages=5–26|doi=10.2307/2940531|jstor=2940531}}</ref>

Dewey left the [[University of Chicago]] in 1904 over issues relating to the Dewey School.<ref>{{Cite web|title=John Dewey, Philosophy and Education|url=https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/projects/centcat/fac/facch08_01.html}}</ref>

Dewey's influence began to decline in the time after the [[World War II|Second World War]] and particularly in the [[Cold War]] era, as more conservative educational policies came to the fore.

====Administrative progressives====
The form of [[educational progressivism]] which was most successful in having its [[policies]] implemented has been dubbed "administrative progressivism" by historians. This began to be implemented in the early 20th century. While influenced particularly in its [[rhetoric]] by Dewey and even more by his popularizers, administrative progressivism was in its practice much more influenced by the [[Industrial Revolution]] and the concept [[economies of scale]].

The administrative progressives are responsible for many features of modern American education, especially American high schools: counseling programs, the move from many small local high schools to large centralized high schools, curricular differentiation in the form of electives and tracking, curricular, professional, and other forms of standardization, and an increase in state and federal regulation and bureaucracy, with a corresponding reduction of local control at the school board level. (Cf. "State, federal, and local control of education in the United States", below) (Tyack and Cuban, pp.&nbsp;17–26)

These reforms have since become heavily entrenched, and many today who identify themselves as progressives are opposed to many of them, while conservative education reform during the Cold War embraced them as a framework for strengthening traditional curriculum and standards.

More recent methods, instituted by groups such as the think tank [[Reform (think tank)|Reform]]'s education division, and [[S.E.R.]] have attempted to pressure the government of the [[United Kingdom|U.K.]] into more [[modernism|modernist]] educational reform, though this has met with limited success.