We’re winding back the clock to get to the past, to see what the future will look like. A lesson from “mid-history”.
From Back to Godhead Magazine Vol. 28, No. 2, 1994.
Excerpts from “The Return of the One-Room Schoolhouse”
by Urmila devi dasi
When most people lived in villages, each school had so few children that students couldn’t be divided by age. So teaching them together was a convenience. But parents, students, and communities also understood that the main curriculum was the teacher rather than the syllabus or the textbook. The teacher’s personality permeated the school. The teacher gave each student personal attention. And the students were expected to learn character and behavior by working under a moral and self-controlled teacher, rather than by attending a “values clarification” course.
But industrialization pulled together large numbers of people to work in factories. So instead of a village school with twenty or fifty children, suddenly you had a town or city school with five hundred. How to teach them?
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The present Western school system, therefore, has not come about because we’ve found a better way to teach. Rather, it has grown from cities and factories. And like so many adjustments to the industrial revolution, it has simply created more problems.With the crowding of many students into one school, the concept of master and pupil is practically gone. The student is no longer expected to serve and emulate his teacher, because education now aims at a set of “learning objectives” decided by a committee of parents and union workers. Modern schooling is built on textbooks, not teachers. And even if a teacher has high moral and spiritual character, for him to put across his ideals to the students might offend some of the hundreds of families involved. After all, the school a child attends is not the one parents choose because of the teacher they admire but the one that falls in the school district where the parents live and work.
Schools responded to having large numbers of students by grouping them by age and then teaching all students of the same age the same things at the same time. But children learn at different speeds. So in a modern class of thirty students, may-be two can follow what the teacher is saying. The rest are either frustrated or bored. The students who can’t follow become discipline problems, the frustrated ones often falling behind, later to become society’s misfits.
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In the days of the one-room schoolhouse, no one heard of a “generation gap.” But today’s fifteen-year-old student can avoid contact with most adults and with most young children. So we now have subcultures of children and teenagers with their own music, language, customs, and styles of clothing and hair. Denied an opportunity to mingle with all ages, children and young people lose a sense of responsibility and of their own place in life. For example, instead of helping adults, teenagers see them as being almost a different species.
Two things from this:
- The modern schooling system is based on an industrial age paradigm of mass production
- The exaggerated “generation gap” is a product of this artificial stratification
Next: The Old School is the True School…
