Essay on Education

Essay on Education

A brief history of education and the mission of teaching

Education has always played a fundamental role in the transmission and preservation of knowledge from generation to generation. The possibility of teaching, that is, of educating or training, goes much further than simply offering young people techniques and objective knowledge to memorize and exercise to enable them to acquire a trade. Educating is also transmitting fundamental values, teaching a vision of the world and consolidating behaviors and ways of thinking. It is perpetuating a system and at the same time sowing the seeds of the change to come.

Since when did he educate himself?

A brief history of education goes back, of course, to ancient times, when the first teaching models emerged that worked hand in hand with the religion. The Judeo-Christian commandments, for example, were nothing more than a way of "educating" the people of Israel: convincing them to follow certain norms, to respect certain values, even performing rites. There are many other examples, such as millennial

traditions of China, India and Egypt, in which the commoner was taught not only to perform his peasant tasks - something that he learned by imitating his parents - but also to worship the sun and his representative on Earth, the Pharaoh.

Teaching in those times consisted of the transmission of a trade (a way of working) by the family or local officiants (the village blacksmith taught his young apprentices, for example); and in a religious formation, which contained moral values, political considerations, eating habits and ritual mechanisms (such as praying or giving thanks before eating).

These teachings were taught orally and by repetition, which limited the learning memory and incidentally allowed the distortion of the message: each person could memorize things in a slightly different way.

For the emergence of the school, or of a space remotely similar to what we understand by it today, the invention of writing would be necessary, that is, of a technology capable of making ideas last beyond the generation of the person who conceived them. Thus, sacred texts could be taught and disseminated, artistic works preserved, and education massed and made more complex.

In addition, writing is itself a knowledge that must be learned, so the first educational systems in India, China and Egypt consisted precisely of literacy and reading religious texts, as well as the exercise of physical activities such as gymnastics, swimming, or the practice of drawing and geometry.

Still, the first proper educational system arose in ancient Greece. Initially it was destined for the children of the nobility, but it ended up being administered by the State and, therefore, destined for all free young Greek men. Teaching was initially in the hands of a teacher or rhetor, who through physical punishment imparted discipline, sports and mnemonics to form individuals who could later be educated by philosophers, students of various natural, social, mathematical and literary subjects.

However, education in ancient Greece responded to different models, depending on the city-state in which it was developed: the Athenian model, centered on the reading of Homer and the kalokagathía, the "education of the body and the soul" or Spartan education, devoted almost entirely to preparation for war and civil and political participation.

It was so in the 4th century AD. C., during the government of Alexander the Great, the concept of Enkiklos paideia (term from which our word "encyclopedia" comes), that is, from the knowledge that must be required of every cultured man, composed of 7 Sciences different: grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. Hence, Greek culture became a reference of refinement and civilization for the Roman elites.

It was the Romans, in fact, who systematized Greek teaching and turned it properly into a process, a massive dynamic and geared, through the first schools, lyceums (name taken from the gymnasium in Greece where Aristotle taught him) and academies.

Medieval teaching

Traditionally, the Middle Ages (the stage that began after the fall of the Western Roman Empire) is considered an era of obscurantism and ignorance, since the Christian religion fanatically imposed itself in the West, denying the rich classical tradition Greco-Roman. Today we know that it was not so, although this time represented an undeniable break with respect to educational models and especially the content taught in ancient times.

Medieval education took place exclusively in the religious sphere, that is, in convents and monasteries, since the written letter was almost strictly reserved for the clergy. Even the medieval nobility was illiterate and scientific and philosophical developments always took place under a strict religious guardianship, lest they incur in heresies or contempt and should be punished exemplary. Latin was the language of sacred texts, such as the Bible, with which it was taught through repetition and memorization, if not through repetitive manual copying.

However, after the educational renewal of Charlemagne in the 9th century, schools were created open to the non-religious, although in complete control of the latter. Thus, an educational model was designed that contemplated only two instances: the monastic school, dedicated to primary studies or basic education, mainly oral and free, for the common people; and the episcopal or cathedral school, in charge of secondary studies, which took place in the monasteries and where exclusively the young aristocrats, those who were trained for the clergy and those who were exceptionally gifted.

As for the syllabus, basic education was above all that: fundamental. Commoners were not even taught to read and write, as they were skills they would never need in the course of their lives. On the other hand, higher education contemplated two sets of knowledge: the trivium (grammar, dialectic and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy). Many of these knowledge were inherited from Greek philosophers such as Aristotle or Ptolemy, as long as they did not contradict the prevailing religious creed.

Modern education

To arrive at modern education, a prelude to the contemporary one, the 1500 years of the Middle Ages would have to pass and the Renaissance would take place in Europe. This aesthetic and philosophical movement born in Italy took up the classical teachings and the Greco-Roman heritage, and broke with the rigid schemes of medieval scholasticism. Humanism, the new cultural and thought trend, allowed new freedoms individual decision to place the human being at the center of creation, a place traditionally occupied by God.

One of the great pedagogues who built modern education was Juan Amos Comenius (1592-1670), who proposed a model school from early childhood since he did not consider the family to be an institution capable of transmitting values ​​to the kid. Your text Magna Didactics was key in the organization of the pedagogical ideas of the moment, among which was the necessary gradualism learning, that is, that young people learn gradually according to their physical growth and personal.

For centuries to come, the class struggle was created that ended the Old Regime and established capitalism and also transformed the school and the educational process. The new educational process focused on the consolidation of democratic and patriotic values, indispensable in the era of nation-states, and also in learning more and more specialized and profitable trades and knowledge, that is, in training more and more workers specialized.

This was logically influenced by the rise of science and technological development, which demonstrated for better and for worse the immense power that exists in accumulated knowledge: by stopping On the shoulders of giants, as Isaac Newton formulated it, we can come to glimpse the most complex universal truths and, consequently, to dominate the natural forces at our disposal. benefit. And education, as if that were not enough, will serve to teach us to wield that power for the benefit of the species and not to their selfish detriment, as long as we know how to learn from the mistakes of the past. Remembering them, transmitting them and interpreting them: this is one of the fundamental tasks of contemporary education.

References:

• "Essay" in WIkipedia.
• "History of education" in Wikipedia.
• "Teaching models" in Wikipedia.
• "The evolution of education in Latin America" ​​in 21st Century University.

What is an essay?

The test it's a literary genre, whose text is characterized by being written in prose and by addressing a specific topic freely, making use of the arguments and the author's appreciations, as well as the literary and poetic resources that make it possible to embellish the work and enhance its aesthetic features. It is considered a genre born in the European Renaissance, fruit, above all, from the pen of the French writer Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), and that over the centuries it has become the most used format to express ideas in a structured, didactic and formal.

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