A Brief History of Teaching

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A Brief History of Teaching

• By Charles Kimball
• EME2040

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• For thousands of years, methods of instruction
  didnt change much.
• In fact, most of the changes have taken place
  since 1900.

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The oldest forms of writing took many years to
learn.
Hieroglyphics
Cuneiform
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And the teaching methods werent very friendly,
either.

• Babylonians called a teacher the one in charge
  of the whip.
• Egyptians liked to say that a boys ears are on
  his back.

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But if you could learn in school, it was worth it.

• Back then, less than 10 percent of the people
  knew how to read and write.
• That meant good jobs for those who graduated.

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Then the alphabet replaced hieroglyphics
cuneiform.

• However, learning to read was still a challenge.
  Why?

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Because at this stage writing didnt have many of
the features that help us to understand it, like

• Punctuation.
• Spaces between the words.
• Lower-case letters.
• Sometimes it wasnt even clear which direction
  the words should be read in.

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How quickly do you think you can read something
like this?
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• In addition, most writing in medieval Europe was
  done in Greek or Latin, not the languages people
  learned as children.
• Medieval monks added spaces and lower-case
  letters to the manuscripts they copied, once they
  were convinced that this didnt waste space.

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Even so, books were very expensive.

• The average noble might have twenty books in his
  library, and only the Church could afford more
  than that.
• The high price was caused by the amount of work,
  and expensive materials it took about 300
  sheepskins to make enough parchment for one Bible.

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Three inventions during the Renaissance made
books easier to make, and easier to understand

• Paper.
• The printing press.
• Standardized forms of modern languages (Italian,
  German, English, French and Spanish).

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John Amos Comenius

• Lived in what is now the Czech Republic,
  1592-1670.
• Nicknamed The Incomparable Moravian.
• Introduced textbooks with pictures in them.

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18th 19th Century Innovations

• A few widely used textbooks, like the New England
  Primer (1700s) and the McGuffey Reader (1840s).
• Wall charts (1826).
• Models (1855).
• Kindergarten, developed by Friedrich Froebel
  (1837) and Maria Montessori (1901).

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Early Steps in the Audiovisual Movement

• Educational museums (1904).
• Educational films (1911).
• Instruction by radio (1929).
• Multi-media training (1945, for the armed
  forces).
• Educational TV (1953).
• Programmed instruction (1957).

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Developments In My Lifetime

• PBS (1967).
• Apple makes the first personal computer (1977).
• Computer-assisted instruction (1980s).
• CD-ROMs, teleconferencing, the Internet, virtual
  reality (1990s).
• And theres much more on the way!

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• Another PowerPoint presentation by Charles
  Kimball.
• To view more like it, visit the Technology For
  Educators HQ.

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