My Opinion on 5 Works about Education, Teaching, and Learning - Volume 13
People assume that education has changed a lot over the last couple thousand years. Some things have changed, but for the most part, people are wrong and education and learning have stayed quite similar through the ages. In this article we'll look at things that are very modern, things that are very old, and things in-between, and see that as things change they often stay the same.
'Edict of Maximum Prices' by Diocletian 301 AD
In ancient Rome there were price controls. This included teaching fees. I've taken a section of those prices here so we can see the value hierarchy of different types of teaching. These prices are in denarius communis, which was an accounting currency at the time. The prices are per pupil per month. Attorneys happen to be included in this same section and instead of removing that I included it.
Gymnastic instructor 50
Pedagogue 50
Elementary teacher 50
Teacher of arithmetic 75
Teacher for shorthand 75
Teacher of manuscript writing or palaeography 50
Teacher of Greek or Latin literature and of geometry 200
Teacher of rhetoric or public speaking 250
Attorney for opening a case 250
Attorney for pleading a case 1,000
Teacher of architecture 100
It's an interesting comparison. You can see a teacher of architecture, and think about the amazing architecture in ancient Rome, makes twice as much as an elementary, gymnastics, or writing teacher. But, a teacher of Greek or Latin literature, as well as a teacher of geometry, makes twice as much as the teacher of architecture. And a teacher of rhetoric makes even more. This shows a clear value hierarchy.
First tier: rhetoric and public speaking
Second tier: Greek and Latin literature and geometry
Third tier: architecture
Fourth tier: arithmetic and shorthand
Fifth tier: gymnastics, general education, elementary education, manuscript reading and writing
Setting price controls is different than having government funded and controlled schools. A couple hundred years before Diocletian there was the emperor Vespasian. In 'The Life of Vespasian' in 'The Lives of the Twelve Caesars' by C. Suetonius Tranquillus he writes about Vespasian in 69 to 79 AD paying teachers from tax money. "He was the first to establish a regular salary of a hundred thousand sesterces for Latin and Greek teachers of rhetoric, paid from the privy purse." Again we see rhetoric as the highest priority in education. And many hundreds of years before that Solon and Draco in ancient Athens had strict laws about education, so government control of education is very old.
The 'Edict of Maximum Prices' helped reinforce a couple of things I already knew. One, the highest priority in ancient education was rhetoric, which is a different priority than our society, and I'm not sure we're better on that account. Two, government control over education is ancient.
Chapter 11 'Saved' from 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X' as told to Alex Haley by Malcolm X 1965
I haven't read this entire book yet. Eventually I'm sure I will. But I was curious how Malcolm X became the intellectual that he became with very little schooling, and this chapter covers that.
Malcolm X only went to school through the 8th grade. He was a street hustler and ended up in prison. While in prison he wrote a letter to Elijah Muhammad, a religious leader his family had encouraged him to contact. Malcolm X could barely read and write, so he rewrote the letters over and over again, the first one 25 times before he sent it. Elijah responded, and Malcolm X became an odd version of Muslim, which he was later moving away from toward a more traditional Islam when the Nation of Islam killed him. Malcolm X says it took him a week of trying to convince himself to pray, and it was the hardest thing he ever did. After his conversion he became devoted, and prison ended up with him being something like a religious hermit. (His original name was Malcolm Little.)
Malcolm started writing two letters per day, one to Elijah and one to various other people he knew. He was frustrated with his bad letters and wanted to improve, and started what he called a "homemade education." He states, "Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something I’ve said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This impression is due entirely to my prison studies."
Pay attention to this, we can learn a lot about education and learning here in just a few paragraphs.
"It really began back in the Charlestown Prison, when Bimbi first made me feel envy of his stock of knowledge. Bimbi had always taken charge of any conversations he was in, and I tried to emulate him. But every book I picked up had few sentences which didn’t contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the words that might as well have been in Chinese. When I just skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with little idea of what the book said.
I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary—to study, to learn some words. I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve my penmanship. It was sad. I couldn’t even write in a straight line. It was both ideas together that moved me to request a dictionary along with some tablets and pencils from the Norfolk Prison school.
I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages. I’d never realized so many words existed! I didn’t know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.
In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.
I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I’d written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.
I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words—immensely proud to realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I’d written words that I never knew were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember what many of these words meant. I reviewed the words whose meanings I didn’t remember. Funny thing, from the dictionary first page right now, that “aardvark” springs to my mind. The dictionary had a picture of it, a long-tailed, long-eared, burrowing African mammal, which lives off termites caught by sticking out its tongue as an anteater does for ants.
I was so fascinated that I went on—I copied the dictionary’s next page. And the same experience came when I studied that. With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally the dictionary’s A section had filled a whole tablet—and I went on into the B’s. That was the way I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary. It went a lot faster after so much practice helped me to pick up handwriting speed. Between what I wrote in my tablet, and writing letters, during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words.
I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge. Between Mr. Muhammad’s teachings, my correspondence, my visitors, and my reading of books, months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life."
(It's amazing, but I've introduced the idea of looking up the meaning of words to be able to understand what they're reading to college students, and they thought it was a great idea.) For Malcolm, there was a good library at the prison that he used. There were debate groups and the prisoners that excelled at knowledge through knowing trivia, reading a lot, and debating were looked up to and respected. Even after lights out there was a little stream of light in his cell that Malcolm would sit in and read at night. He would have to jump back in bed and pretend to be asleep every hour during the guard patrols.
Wanting to write led to reading, and then his reading led to participating in the weekly debating group. Look at that development, reading and writing as a foundation for rhetoric, the highest educational value of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Now, Malcolm used all of his learning in history and philosophy, and his skill in rhetoric, to teach hate of white people, and I don't like that, but there is so much to learn here about learning.
You may think that anyone who was forced to do what Malcolm was, reading and writing the entire dictionary, would become intelligent. But that's not correct. It first started with motivation. Malcolm was motivated to emulate an intelligent friend. Then he was motivated to be able to write well to a mentor. He himself choose the method of his learning. Without the seed of motivation nothing else would have grown. With the motivational seed, and the access to books and the opportunity to write and debate, he grew into a uniquely powerful intellect. Those are the keys that I took away from this chapter.
'The Afterlife of Big Ideas in Education Reform' by Michael Hobbes 15 August 2017
This is a quite interesting article. Nathan Hale High School in Seattle, Washington was a failing school. The Principal Eric Benson had the idea, inspired by some other success stories, of breaking the school into smaller school units. This started in 1998. By 2006 the school was doing well. During this same time period the Gates Foundation and governments put a ton of money into this same type of experiment all over the country. The powerful elites with plans to help everyone even if it hurts everyone, even if they have to take people's tax money under threat of force, give them no real choice, and then damage their children with their own money. The elites know that they can just lie afterward and most people will believe the propaganda. This is one of an endless number of those examples. Nathan Hale became a failing school once again. So, why did it uniquely succeed for that limited time in that limited place?
Hobbes makes the case that it wasn't really the restructuring that was key, it was how it was done. Leading up the the restructuring of the school Benson had prepared and involved the school faculty and staff in the plan. The teachers and staff actually designed the change for four years before it was implemented. At the same time, because Nathan Hale was a failing school, the state gave budget control to Benson. Benson used that control to cut non-teaching staff and add more teaching staff.
But, it's a contradiction to have freedom in government schools, which are implemented to limit freedom, so after a number of years the autonomy of the principal to control the budget and staff was once again taken away. Instead of the work sessions that the teachers had organized there are normal performance evaluations. The class sizes have grown. The school can spend millions on having a nice building and sports fields, but can't increase the budget for operations, like things that actually help learning.
It turns out that you can get schools to pretend and appear to do anything by offering them money. Then when the money incentive goes away the facade of a fake or half reform also goes away, and things are back to what they were before or worse. Not every time, but commonly.
At one time Seattle even tried giving all of the principals of the schools independence and autonomy over budgets and staff. Some schools succeeded and some failed. But, because it's a government, the failing schools weren't shut down and the failing principals weren't fired, the government just took back control in response to the failures, meaning the failures were able to keep failing and the successes had to start failing. The government response to successful freedom is always to stop it. The government can always trick the majority of people into believing that's a good thing.
Hobbes makes some conclusions: "Over and over again, studies investigate exciting new models and come to the same pedestrian conclusion: School reforms work when they are implemented by good leaders, empowered teachers, and adequately funded administrators. When they aren’t, they don’t." and "Maybe when it comes to education reform, big ideas don’t matter. There will never be a structure or a technology or a method that is more powerful than the environment in which it is applied. Big ideas are, at their best or their worst, simply a mirror—an amplified or diminished reflection of the leaders, the institutions, and the people expected to carry them out."
I get the feeling though that he's still in support of government school reform, when the actual answer is obvious: there shouldn't be government schools. Yet, there almost always have been, and there always will be, because the goal of government schools isn't education and learning, it's government control, and it's a very easy thing to sell to the public. That's the key takeaway here, the government school reforms will always fail on a large scale, but the real solution of eliminating government schools will never be implemented. It comes down to the parents deciding or not deciding to save their own children.
'Dialogue between a School-Master, and School-Committee' in 'The Columbian Orator' by Caleb Bingham 1797
This book was hugely influential in the development of the United States because it impacted so many people and so many important people. Frederick Douglass was famously self-educated on this book. From what I understand, most likely Abraham Lincoln as well. Maybe that's part of why the two of them got along well once they met.
Bingham states in an introduction to this short story that he hopes only few of these schools continue to exist, but they do. The basic idea is the school had a good teacher, but he was run out of town. A Master Ignoramus wanders into town and talks with the bar-keep about getting a job as a teacher. The school board meets in the bar and has an interview with the Master and a discussion about hiring him. One speaks against hiring him, the others like that he's cheap and don't mind that he's stupid.
The Parson, probably an Anglican minister, gives this statement against the hire: "I protest against your proceeding, and withdraw myself forever from the committee. But I must tell you, your children will reap the bitter consequences of such injudicious measures. It has always been surprising to me, that people in general are more willing to pay their money for any thing else, than for "the one thing needful," that is, for the education of their children. Their taylor must be a workman, their carpenter, a workman, their hair-dresser, a workman, their hostler, a workman; but the instructor of their children must - work cheap!"
This is an interesting criticism. To a large extent schools are often used for babysitting, and that seems to be what the actual value of the majority of the school board is in this story, and they want a cheap and nice babysitter. It's somewhat similar in government schools today. Education and learning are supposed to happen to some limited extent, but to a great extent the parents need and use the school as a babysitter, and since it already has to be paid for by taxes whether you use it or not, it's a cheap or free babysitter. I'm not sure what fully to take away from this little story, but it does hit on the frustrations in education quite well, and Bingham obviously had some experience with such boards himself.
'De Litteris Colendis' letter from Charlemagne to Baugaulf of Fulda, 780-800 AD
This is fascinating. I'm going to copy and paste this entire letter from the Fordham University Medieval Sourcebook along with the typos and errors. Pay attention to the problems addressed in this letter, and pay attention to the motivations and reasons.
"Charles, by the grace of God, King of the Franks and Lombards and Patrician of the Romans, to Abbot Baugulf and to all the congregation, also to the faithful committed to you, we have directed a loving greeting by our ambassadors in the name of omnipotent God.
Be it known, therefore, to your devotion pleasing to God, that we, together with our faithful, have considered it to be useful that the bishoprics and monasteries entrusted by the favor of Christ to our control, in addition, in the culture of letters also ought to be zealous in teaching those who by the gift of God are able to learn, according to the capacity of each individual, so that just as the observance of the rule imparts order and grace to honesty of morals, so also zeal in teaching and learning may do the same for sentences, so that those who desire to please God by living rightly should not neglect to please him also by speaking correctly. For it is written: "Either from thy words thou shalt be justified or from thy words thou shalt be condemned." For although correct conduct may be better than knowledge, nevertheless knowledge precedes conduct. Therefore, each one ought to study what he desires to accomplish, sc) that so much the more fully the mind may know what ought to be clone, as the tongue hastens in the praises of omnipotent God without the hindrances of errors. For since errors should be shunned by all men, so much the more ought they to be avoided as far as possible by those who are chosen for this very purpose alone, so that they ought to be the especial servants of truth. For when in the years just passed letters were often written to us from several monasteries in -which it was stated that the brethren who dwelt there offered up in our behalf sacred and pious prayers, we have recognized in most of these letters both correct thoughts and uncouth expressions; because what pious devotion dictated faithfully to the mind, the tongue, uneducated on account of the neglect of study, was not able to express in the letter without error. Whence it happened that we began to fear lest perchance, as the skill in writing was less, so also the wisdom for understanding the Holy Scriptures might be much less than it rightly ought to be. And we all know well that, although errors of speech are dangerous, far more dangerous are errors of the understanding. Therefore, we exhort you not only not to neglect the study of letters, but also with most humble mind, pleasing to God, to study earnestly in order that you may be able more easily and more correctly to penetrate the mysteries of the divine Scriptures. Since, moreover, images, tropes and similar figures are found in the sacred pages, -no one doubts that each one in reading these will understand the spiritual sense more quickly if previously he shall have been fully instructed in the mastery of letters. Such men truly are to be chosen for this work as have both the will and the ability to learn and a desire to instruct others. And may this be done with a zeal as great as the earnestness with which we command it. For we desire you to be, as it is fitting that soldiers of the church should be, devout in mind, learned in discourse, chaste in conduct and eloquent in speech, so that whosoever shall seek to see you out of reverence of God, or on account of your reputation for holy conduct, just as he is edified by your appearance, may also be instructed by your wisdom, which he has learned from your reading or singing, and may go away joyfully giving thanks to omnipotent God. Do not neglect, therefore, if you wish to have our favor, to send copies of this letter to all your suffragans and fellow-bishops and to all the monasteries. [And let no monk hold courts outside of his monastery or go to the judicial and other public assemblies. Farewell.]"
Over and over in history the importance of reading and writing have been emphasized because of religious study. This letter helped me realize that part of the push in medieval Europe, by none less than Charlemagne himself, was to have proper religious understanding, learning, transmission, and teaching. Slowly the university system arises in Europe out of this push over the next few hundred years.
Conclusion
In this article we see a wide range of times, places, people, races, and religions. Always there are patterns that emerge in the problems of education and learning, and in how education and learning actually happen. The struggle is real, and the solutions are too, but the solutions are for the people that choose them independently instead of waiting for them from without.
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