Ch' 4 Education Revolutionized: The Growth of Modern Schooling

1
Ch. 4 Education RevolutionizedThe Growth of
Modern Schooling

• Beginnings of a Schooled Society
• Enrolments and Attendance Creating a Universal
  Experience
• The Revolution in Expectations
• Expanding Curricula
• Expanding Functions
• Expanding Alternatives
• Exporting the School Model
• The Results of the above
• A dramatic transformation of education
• Schools and schooling are now central to the
  lives of each of us.
• Canada has become a schooled society

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Beginnings of a Schooled Society

• Origins of formal education the early Greek
  philosophers. Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates
• Prior to 16th - schooling occurred in the Church
  - only the clergy needed advanced literacy for
  their work.
• Ariès (1962), a French historian - the school
  class the constituent cell of the school
  system
• Defining attributes of the modern school class
• Most students in a class are the same age
• Classes are organized progressively by knowledge
  level
• Classes meet in separate locations
• A class is often set off by a particular time
  period
• The school class was first organized by level
  of knowledge/ability, not by age.

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Beginnings of a Schooled SocietyTable 4.1
Ages of Pupils at Caen College, 1677
4
Beginnings of a Schooled Society

• Todays classes are age-graded (started in 19th
  century)
• Two worries at play
• rushing students too fast and mixing students of
  different temperaments
• older students were discouraged from remaining
  too long at the same grade level
• Result older students were out of place -
  dropped out of school
• By the early 1800s - informal schooling was
  common in Upper Canada (now Ontario) - family
  tutoring, private schools, and religious schools
• 1807 - a government funded, public system emerged
  

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Beginnings of a Schooled Society

• Prentice (1977) children of all ages gathered
  together under one teacher for a few months or
  years, to learn the three Rs (reading, riting,
  and rithmetic) and a little religion and
  morals.
• By mid-century, schooling became centrally
  controlled and regulated
• By 1871
• Children between 7 and 12 were required to attend
  school for at least four months of the year
• Teacher certification was mandated
• School inspections were instituted
• The course of study, the books, and the school
  rules, gradually became centralized
• Under the control of the provincial Chief
  Superintendent of Common Schools

6
Beginnings of a Schooled Society

• What accounts for this transition?
• Economic/industrialization Schooling became
  essential to ensure a skilled and compliant
  labour force
• Technical complexity Schooling ensured young
  people had the rudimentary skills essential in a
  world growing more complex
• Child susceptibility in a diverse world
  Schooling ensured children adopted a common value
  system
• Nation-building Schooling part of a larger
  process of building an independent country

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Beginnings of a Schooled Society

• Points 1 2 occurred later in Canada as
  industrialization grew but were not the initial
  contributing factors
• Mass schooling was in place well before
  large-scale industrialization occurred
• A largely rural population in 1876 - hard to
  explain the importance of the three Rs as a
  consequence of the technical demands of a complex
  society
• Little in the historical record to suggest this
  as the prime educational motivator

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Beginnings of a Schooled Society

• Points 3 4 have more support
• Prentice (1977) - reason for promoting schooling
  was the weakness and incapacity of the young
• Children were understood to differ from adults
  to require different support
• Childhood - a transition to adulthood - young
  were susceptible to dangerous, amoral ideas.
• School - foundational moral values, strict
  discipline, and proper deportment
• Came from
• A religious conviction - shared by such early
  school promoters as Alexander Forrester (Nova
  Scotia), Egerton Ryerson (Upper Canada), and John
  Jessop (BC).
• Support came largely from the government

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Beginnings of a Schooled Society

• Curtis (1988) - need to understand the
  importance of government action and
  nation-building
• Political instability - e.g. the 1837 Rebellion -
  promoted fears of divisiveness and factionalism
• The larger waves of in-migration from Europe
  meant a need for social integration
• From 19th century in Canada
• Schooling more centralized - govt. controlling
  who would teach and what they would teach and
  when
• School inspection was prominent Truant officers
• Funding provided from govt.
• Encouraging a school system that was distanced
  from religious instruction.

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Beginnings of a Schooled Society

• This latter issue raises the historic relation
  between church and state
• Earliest educators in Canada - the Jesuits,
  Recollects, and others - sought to bring
  Christian values and ideals to the Aboriginal
• Manzer (1994) Which great social institution,
  church or state, should exercise ultimate
  authority over the guidance of learning?
• Complicating this history in Canada were various
  interest groups.
• English, French, and Aboriginal - differed
  principally along the lines of religion,
  language, ancestry, and provincial
  majority/minority status
• Constitution Act of 1867 (British North America
  Act)
• delegated responsibility for education to the
  provinces (i.e., to the state)
• preservation of separate schooling for religious
  denominations
• gave the state the power to enact legislation
  and collect taxes for schools

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Beginnings of a Schooled Society

• Quebec Newfoundland - separate Roman Catholic
  and Protestant school authorities dominated K12
  education
• In other provinces, provincial Departments of
  Education were more powerful, with various levels
  of support existing for separate religious
  schools
• Majority of provincial school systems were
  non-denominational - though typically Christian
  schools and really Protestant in character
• Until the 1960s many Canadian schoolchildren
  began their day by reciting the Lords Prayer and
  reading from the King James Bible

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Beginnings of a Schooled Society

• Reference to common schools is important
• Common vision a rejection of the European, and
  especially British, model of class-based or
  elitist education
• Common school movement meant that all children
  could attend school, regardless of their social
  class
• Govt. saw schools as a method to build a nation
  and enhance citizenship
• School promoters saw schooling as an effective
  way to build a better society, instilling in
  everyone, no matter what their social class,
  common values and a strong work ethic.

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Enrolments and AttendanceCreating a Universal
Experience

• Earliest public schools were quite humble
• Mid-1800s schools were single house
• Employed a single teacher
• Children not segregatged by age group
• Teachers were minimally educated
• Instruction rarely beyond rudimentary literacy
  and mathematics
• By 1900 - a tiny fraction of students would
  complete high school
• School - something to attend intermittently for
  eight or so years
• Attained basic literacy and numeracy
• Received instruction in the rudiments of
  (Christian) religion and citizenship.

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Enrolments and AttendanceCreating a Universal
Experience

• 20th century
• School populations exploded
• Provinces established Departments of Education
• One-room schoolhouses were gradually replaced
  with modern buildings
• Far more bureaucratic, standardized, and
  institutional character
• Created a more uniform, mass form of schooling
• Average size of a Canadian school
• 66 students in the 1920s
• 156 in 1960
• 350 by 1970

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Enrolments and AttendanceCreating a Universal
Experience

• New norms emerged - now common for parents to
  enrol their children in local schools
• Enrolments are not the same as actual school
  attendance
• Earlier eras - many children did not attend
  full-time because they worked on family farms or
  did other labour
• 1867 - only four in 10 registered pupils would
  attend on any given day
• Would disappear from schools during some seasons
  - needed for farming, fishing, or trapping
• Many schools did not offer instruction for
  children younger than seven
• Early 1930s - just over 50 of six-year-olds
  were in school and 20 of five-year-olds
  attended classes
• Compulsory starting ages for schooling did not
  drop to ages five and six until later

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Enrolments and AttendanceCreating a Universal
Experience

• Figure 4.2 (p.60)
• Did not offer most young people a common
  schooling experience until the 1930s
• By then, attendance more regular and predictable
• Most students began school at age six
• Attending most days in non-summer months
• The rate of change accelerated again after 1950
• By the 1960s full attendance in public elementary
  and high over 90 per cent

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Enrolments and AttendanceCreating a Universal
Experience

• Figure 4.3 (page 61)
• As late as 1951 more than half of Canadas
  population age 15 and older had not attained even
  a Grade 9 level of schooling
• Real change started in the 1950s
• Economic boom of the post-World War II years
• A new mindset among policy-makers in Canada and
  most Western nations
• Actively promoted more schooling for longer
  periods of everyones life
• The concept of education as an economic engine
  began in earnest

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Enrolments and AttendanceCreating a Universal
Experience

• Post-World War II period trends emerge
• First the completion of elementary years nearly
  universal
• Mid-1960s, almost every Canadian-born youth
  completed at least the equivalent of Grade 8.
• Second high school graduation became a benchmark
• rather than seeking full-time jobs - young people
  completed high school
• Term high school dropout emerged as a new
  symbol of deviance
• Youth who failed to complete Grade 12 or its
  equivalent by the age of 20 were not considered
  normal - branded as deviant
• Labelled today being at-risk youth.

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Enrolments and AttendanceCreating a Universal
Experience

• Reasons for dropping out both individual and
  institutional
• Poverty
• A lack of parental education
• A lack of intellectual nourishment at home (or
  at school)
• A lack of support programs for these youth
• A curriculum that is insensitive to their needs
• High school graduation - a taken-for-granted
  expectation
• Today society holds that all youth should
  complete high school
• Non-completion signals a problem with the
  student, the family, and/or the school

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Enrolments and AttendanceCreating a Universal
Experience

• Table 4.2 (page 62)
• Tracing money is another way to demonstrate
  expansion
• Subsequent to World War II the total funding for
  schooling surged.
• Total amount of money going to Canadian education
  
• Amount of funding per student from 1950 to 1974 -
  25-year period
• Total education funding increased
  twenty-five-fold
• Amount of funding per student rose by a factor of
  10
• Increased funding - a function both of more
  students and more money for each student

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Enrolments and AttendanceCreating a Universal
Experience

• Profound increases in spending
• Late 1960s - funding increase per pupil nearly
  10 per cent every year
• More government money went to education than to
  health care
• The scale of monetary support for schooling was
  unprecedented
• Three causal factors
• Industry and science
• Credential inflation
• Equality of opportunity
• Has reversed dramatically today!!!
• Now governments spend much more on health

22
Enrolments and AttendanceCreating a Universal
Experience

• Character of work has changed dramatically over
  the last 100 years
• Science - affected both what we built and how we
  built
• Cognitive know-how of the labour force upgraded
• Technical complexity was accelerating
• More work was related to the service side of the
  economy
• Jobs required a very different set of skills
• Rise in educational requirements for jobs

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Enrolments and AttendanceCreating a Universal
Experience

• Schooling has always played an important role in
  developing in students a strong work ethic,
  discipline, reliability, and a willingness to
  follow orders
• Demonstrating these attributes in schools has
  normally led to grade promotion
• These are among the skills that remain highly
  valued in the workplace
• School expansion also fuelled by equality of
  opportunity
• Not funded solely for the privilege of one social
  class
• Common schools were made available to everyone
• Late 1960s and into the 1970s Prime Minister
  Trudeau spoke about creating a just society.
• Providing opportunities for everyone was a human
  right

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Enrolments and AttendanceCreating a Universal
Experience

• A final major trend in this post-World War II
  period
• The emergence of a new era in higher education
• 1950s to the 1970s - new universities built
• Institutions such as Brock, Cape Breton,
  Lakehead, Simon Fraser,
• and York appeared
• Small religious colleges morphed into Brandon
  University, the University of Waterloo, and the
  University of Windsor.
• Canada was well on its way to becoming a schooled
  society

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Enrolments and AttendanceCreating a Universal
Experience

• Figure 4.4 (page 64)
• Illustrates the relentless rise of post-secondary
  enrolment and graduation rates.
• Numbers of graduates are rising, along with
  population increases
• A growing proportion of younger age groups are
  earning more advanced credentials
• Over half of every new age cohort moves on to
  post-secondary levels
• Not unique to Canada - unprecedented levels
  around the globe.

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Enrolments and AttendanceCreating a Universal
Experience

• Concerns
• Treating youth who do not make that transition to
  college or university as the forgotten half
• Group poorly treated by the education institution
• In 100 years (1900 2000) the worldwide
  enrolment in tertiary education grew 2,000
• Common in many countries for more than half of an
  age cohort to receive some post-secondary
  schooling.

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Enrolments and AttendanceCreating a Universal
Experience

• What is the sum impact of these enrolment trends?
• Represents a profound transformation of peoples
  lives
• Student role emerged as a common experience
• Reshapes individual life courses
• Our notions of growing up and maturing are
  affected by schooling
• Spend ever-longer hours and years in schools,
  rather than in full-time jobs
• Schools now provide a shared experience
• A fundamental shift in how young people are
  prepared for the adult world
• Segregate young people into a specialized
  institution, supervised by paid professionals
• A common experience is provided through an
  age-graded institution

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The Revolution in Expectations

• Dramatically felt at the post-secondary or higher
  education level
• Fifty years ago, community colleges - barely
  existed
• Universities were small elite institutions that
  housed about 7 of the age cohort
• 1970s - university systems changed from having
  an elite to a mass character
• Higher education went from catering to a very
  small minority of young people seeking
  professional careers in a patchwork of mostly
  small institutions to a large system that catered
  to thousands of youth seeking a variety of
  pathways into higher-end labour markets

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The Revolution in Expectations

• Expansion was accomplished by fostering high
  educational aspirations
• High schools sort students into specific tracks
  (e.g., academic, vocational) relatively late
• Majority of students enrolling in the academic
  track
• Promoted an opportunity consciousness among
  youth
• Secondary students feel encouraged to pursue
  further studies
• Current trends - a new stage of higher education
• An evolution from a mass to a universal
  system
• Buoyed by ideologies of lifelong learning
• Post-secondary enrolments may be poised to grow
  further.

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The Revolution in Expectations

• Table 4.3 (page 65)
• Based on a recent survey of Canadian parents
• Amount of educational ambition held by Canadians
  signals a revolution of expectations
• Only 12 of parents do not have post-secondary
  expectations for their children
• 57 of parents expect University attendance for
  their children
• Twice as many parents expect children to be in
  university rather than college
• Todays parents are the most educated in history
• As late as 1991, only 11 per cent of Canadians
  possessed a university degree, while in the same
  year over half of Canadian teens expected to
  attain a degree

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The Revolution in Expectations

• Table 4.4 (page 66)
• Parents educational expectations are moderated
  by their childrens school performance
• Top half of Table
• Parental expectations for children who are
  struggling are low
• Lower half of table
• Majority of parents (72 to 80) whose children do
  a lot of homework, have above-average grades,
  and like school anticipate university for their
  children
• Stems in part from the greater income
  opportunities that university degrees offer

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The Revolution in Expectations

• Historical image of the post-secondary students
  may need revision
• Parents with children who report doing no
  homework (top row, Table 4.4), 42 per cent
  expect their offspring to attend college and 11
  per cent university.
• Majority of parents of low-achieving students or
  of students who dislike school very much, still
  expect their daughters and sons to attend a
  post-secondary institution
• An era of escalating post-secondary attendance
  aspirations
• The rhetoric of universal higher education has
  pervaded the mindset of most Canadians
• They increasingly regard community colleges as a
  repository for remedial students, as an
  institution that takes on all comers
• Most colleges and institutes in Canada have open
  admission policies catering to exactly those
  expectations.

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Expanding Curricula

• A century ago - higher education served only
  specialized purposes like law and medicine using
  universities as entry portals
• Now more occupations and positions can be entered
  only with post-secondary qualifications
• Examples
• The MBA - a necessary passport to enter many
  corporate hierarchies
• Fuelling demand for business schools and programs
• Require police, hairdressers, security guards, or
  sales people to possess college or university
  educations
• Higher credentials have become a minimal
  criterion

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Expanding Curricula

• Curriculum a century ago
• Elementary - basic literacy and mathematics,
  reading storybooks, civics and religious teaching
• Secondary - history and geography courses, basic
  science
• Higher education - philosophy (for theologians),
  law, and medicine
• Curriculum means something very different today
• Content exploded in recent decades
• Largest changes at the post-secondary level
• Two key areas
• Expansion and absorption of vocational training
• Knowledge explosion for technical subjects.
• expanded as a result of the knowledge revolution

35
Expanding Curricula

• High school - Once common for students to take
  single courses in math and science, now there are
  multiple courses
• Post-secondary level - University course
  calendars bulge with hundreds of courses
• Graduate school offerings are also expanding,
  broadening opportunities for masters and
  doctoral students
• Community colleges are increasingly absorbing job
  training for various occupations
• Secondary schools divest themselves of vocational
  education and become more academic in orientation
• This is indicative of a schooled society
• schools, whether secondary or post-secondary, are
  increasingly performing roles that in previous
  generations would have been performed elsewhere

36
Expanding Functions

• District School Boards
• Web site offers a variety of programs that go far
  beyond the three Rs.
• Support of students - access to a range of
  non-teaching professionals, such as occupational
  and physiotherapists, psychologists, social
  workers, and speech pathologists
• Programs for child care, driver education,
  nutrition, parenting, and outdoor education
• Schools perform a variety of roles beyond basic
  cognitive instruction and civic socialization
• Indicative of the central role of schools in
  society increasingly schools are seen as
  principal vehicles for solving many contemporary
  social problems

37
Expanding Functions

• Problems in substance abuse drug education
  programs.
• Teen pregnancy sexually transmitted diseases
  sex education modules
• Racism and intolerance anti-racist and
  multicultural curricula
• Children are malnourished at home school meal
  programs
• Violence schools conflict-resolution modules
• Modern three Rs (reduce, reuse, and recycle)
  school nurturing of awareness

38
Expanding Functions

• Modern Schools
• Rise to the challenge of the knowledge economy
• Retain more and more students for longer and
  longer periods
• Address a multiplicity of social problems
• Schools have much more of a religious-like
  fervour attached to them
• Associated with a faith in progress, in the
  redemptive power of modernity

39
Expanding Alternatives

• A smaller change - one that may have growing
  significance in the coming decades
• Seeing in public schooling an expansion of the
  alternatives that the school class takes - has
  begun to metamorphose
• See mutations beyond standard curricula to
  radically different alternative curricula
• Example - French immersion programming
• Begun in the 1970s to support Canadian
  bilingualism
• Provide an alternative form of schooling for
  students to learn a second language
• Approximately 300,000 students enrolled in
  French immersion (7 of students)
• A variant of the standard school class model - a
  model stressing choice and alternative

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Expanding Alternatives

• Box 4.1 (page 70)
• Edmontons alternative forms of the school
  class
• A wide range of alternative programming for
  students
• Receiving international attention as an exemplar
  for decentralized, site-based decision-making
• More autonomy is given to teachers and school
  administrators in designing effective learning
  programs for students

41
Exporting the School Model

• Trend the exporting of school forms to other
  social institutions
• Trend in criminal justice - the increasing use of
  diversion programs
• Traditional penalties, like incarceration and
  fines, for non-violent crimes seen to be overly
  costly, inhumane, harsh, and counterproductive
• Research in criminology suggests that criminal
  penalties do not always serve as strong
  deterrents for future crime
• Hence recidivism rates are relatively high
• This has led to some reform movements, called in
  some places restorative justice
• Better to educate wrongdoers about their acts
  rather than merely punish them

42
Exporting the School Model

• Diversion programs substituting penalties for
  some other program, such as treatment, community
  service, and education.
• Rise of diversion programs that embrace a
  school-like form
• Many programs have formal goals of educating
  offenders through the use of instructors,
  curricula, and various schoollike techniques.
• Schools have been used as an alternative
  sentence for a variety of offences, including
  drinking and driving, harassment, shoplifting,
  and physical battery, the latter handled through
  anger-management schools.

43
Exporting the School Model

• Family life increasingly informed by parenting
  classes
• Parenting curriculum includes, programs in
  childbirth, toy safety, sibling management,
  financial investing for your child, and efficient
  management of family time
• New conceptions of childhood combined with
  changing family practices push the schooling
  model downward into early childhood education and
  daycare
• Leisure life - availability of courses in all
  areas of recreation, learning how to play bridge
  to learning how to cycle around Europe
• Corporations are increasingly turning to
  school-like forms to handle their training and
  apprenticeship.