A History of American Education and the Whole Child: Part 1
BY LIZZIE MARGOLIUS
STATEWIDE - The year is 1803 and your child gets up at 6:00 A.M. to get ready to do chores such as chopping firewood, heating the stove, making breakfast and feeding the livestock. Then they sit in their favorite chair and read the New England Primer, go through their math tables, and spend the remainder of the day outside learning about nature by foraging, sketching, or collecting rocks. Depending on the age of your child and your financial status, at some point, your child may attend school at a church, have private tutoring, or attend a preparatory school.
The year is 2025 and your child gets up at 6:00 A.M. to get ready for school, quickly eats breakfast, boards the bus, and returns home to you around 3:00 P.M. What did your child do at school all day? Well, if you’re in a typical school district anywhere in America, your child spent their day shuffling between classrooms, classes, lunch, and recess. But what exactly did they learn in the 7-8 hours they were away?
Education has dramatically changed in the last 200+ years. All it took was a few highly progressive men fascinated with how education was run in Europe to flip American education upside down. Around the 1830s Frederick Froebel invented kindergarten, which was eventually made illegal, but American Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, of Massachusetts, went to Germany to study kindergartens and came back to America and almost overnight, kindergartens began to spring up everywhere.
Simultaneously Horace Mann, Secretary for the Massachusetts Board of Education, began toying with the idea of government provided education, having been inspired by Prussia’s government education system, which was the first of its kind in the world. Soon public schools began popping up throughout America. Finally, in the early 1900s John Dewey, of Vermont, took a young American public education system, and propelled it even further away from classical, traditional educational models, and more towards a collectivist, utopian, Soviet Union inspired model that we still use today. Dewey was strongly against the 3 R’s, reading, writing, and arithmetic, and firmly fixated on socialization and collectivism.
Fast forward to 2007 when the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development convened and proposed a question, “if we were to create an education system today from scratch, what would it look like, how would it be different, and what would we do differently within that new model?”.
Who is the ASCD? They are a global resource for teachers, principals, and superintendents and their mission is to support educators in redesigning education. The ASCD purpose is vague at best with the use of words like transformative, collective, pedagogy, equitable, and sustainability. What we do know is that the ASCD is connected to over 60 other policy and governmental groups such as SoLD (Science of Learning and Development), AIR (American Institutes for Research), Learning Policy Institute, CDC, Aspen Institute, etc. The ASCD, which is not a part of the government, nor the department of education took it upon itself to rewrite education, and then proposed it to all 50 states, all of which have adopted their new version of education called Whole Child. We will cover Whole Child in depth in a series on The Ohio Register. Get ready for your mind to be blown regarding the future of education and the fight over who will control your child.
