These are some quotes from Our Western Education Heritage by Christopher J. Lucas (New York: Macmillan, 1972).
The book is a history of western education. It covers preliterate cultures, Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and progressively on up to the 20th century. I thought these different models of education might be helpful in planning an educational system for a future society, as discussed in this thread: https://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,41130.0.html [Post-Imperialism - A Template for a New Social Order])
The book is a history of western education. It covers preliterate cultures, Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and progressively on up to the 20th century. I thought these different models of education might be helpful in planning an educational system for a future society, as discussed in this thread: https://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,41130.0.html [Post-Imperialism - A Template for a New Social Order])
- pages 11-20.A primitive society has few differentiated institutions. There is no formal school because the culture does not require one. Daily experience is educational and almost every member of society serves as a teacher. Ordinary learning processes can be handled more directly by allowing the child to share actively in the life of the community. Indeed, because there are fewer skills to transmit, because knowledge is less specialized and the way of life of people is enacted before his own eyes, the student learns directly from firsthand experience. This facet of primitive education should serve as a reminder to modern educators that noninstitutionalized, informal learning is an important part of education in any culture. It is easy to forget that the student is subject to many forces besides those in the classroom. The continuing job of an effective teacher ought to be to seek ways of taking these influences into account and using them to advantage whenever possible.
Still another notable feature of primitive education is that its objectives are almost self-evident to the participants. The link between what is to be learned and how that knowledge will be used is directly apparent. Training for survival is something that connects with the level of experience the student handles naturally. The child sees how and why it is necessary for him to acquire certain basic skills through unsheltered and intimate exposure. In today’s schools, on the other hand, a student may be unable to perceive how the curriculum serves his interests and needs. A symptom of this is the tendency of teachers to think of motivation as an extra added ingredient, a corrective for pupil apathy that is somehow added into the educational situation. Faced with indifference, even outright hostility, the teacher feels the material has to be made more interesting in order to induce students to learn. A lag, psychological and temporal, between what society decides its youth should learn and the point when the student internalizes the requirement of knowing, say, algebra because now he finds it useful, is likely to be a veritable chasm in the classroom.
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The overriding consideration governing the purpose of primitive education is security. The tribe always struggles to maintain itself against formidable odds. Obtaining the basic necessities of life is fraught with peril. Wars, plagues, floods, and ecological upsets leading to the exhaustion of the food supply are always immediate possibilities. In consequence, life can be exceedingly brutal. The tribe's main job has had to be a breaking in of each new generation to the ways of life followed in the community. No halfway measures suffice: either the child thoroughly masters the rules for survival or he does not. Implicit obedience is the sine qua non for acceptance into the tribe. Outside it, he would die. The requisite for survival is conformity to the group's norms. At first it is entirely unconscious; later, behavior is sanctioned by tribal conventions. Education necessarily means rooting out variations in thought or practice while stamping group characteristics upon the youth. Through trial and error, by participating in ceremonies and rituals, by conscious imitation of one's elders, through the instruction received in the familial group, the child learns what is expected of him. He becomes an individual, as has been noted, only insofar as he subordinates himself to the group.
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The Open and the Closed Society
To understand the rigidity of primitive man one must appreciate how differently he conceives his relation to his environment. The world of nature is immutable, fixed, something to adapt to, rather than a set of conditions to be surmounted.
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Karl Popper hypothesizes that early cultures pass through stages when a distinction between natural laws and normative, i.e., man-made, conventions is not made yet. The unpleasant consequences of trying to “break” a law of nature are on a par with the sanctions imposed by other men when a normative taboo is broken. Both conventional and natural regularities are felt to be beyond and possibility of alteration.
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Prior to the stage where the division of norms and natural regularities is apparent, the tribe represents a closed society. It is characterized by an almost irrational attitude toward mores, morals, and beliefs. Customs become more rigid than demonstrably necessary for the survival of the group. The place of the herd or tribe is elevated to a dominant position. A principle of collective utility – what serves the interest of the tribe – remains the ultimate ethical consideration. Morality means, literally, only actions that accord with the collective interest are right. A corollary is that the individual as such has no rights, no ethical prerogatives, no sphere of social autonomy. The individual exists for the sake of the societal whole, not vice versa.
The closed society cannot tolerate heterodoxy. It confines individual initiative within certain limits. Social cohesion, safety, and stability are its primary values. Custom and tradition are emphasized over innovation and experimentation in all areas of life – religious, political, economic, and moral. Education is a tool to serve the interest of the dominant group, to mold children to a predetermined pattern, and to ensure that the social fabric is kept intact.
Somewhere near the other end of a continuum along which all cultures might be arranged is the antithesis to a tribal society, the open society. It is the society whose culture not only tolerates heresy of all kinds but positively encourages diversity in customs and beliefs. The culture balances individual rights against (or in cooperation with) group needs. If fosters opportunities to create, to explore, to push back the limits in every field. As an ideal type, the open society welcomes new ideas, novel life styles, and unorthodox opinions. Its educational system, it can be conjectured, begins with an affirmation of the intrinsic importance of the individual; that is the point of departure for everything else.
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In any society some order is necessary. Its participants need to share some basic assumptions and ways of doing things. It is vital to have some traditions to which people adhere. A society is an impossibility unless its members cooperate and work together. Shared beliefs and customs are the social glue that keeps a culture from disintegrating and the society from dissolving. However – and this is crucial – when a society attains a level of mastery over its environment that makes it stable enough to tolerate mistakes, when the price for error is not outright destruction, then room must be made for innovation. Progress demands experimentation: in finding new modes of production, exploring untried avenues of though, and disclosing overlooked ways of arranging social life. A culture has to find a balance, not the tepid mediocrity of bourgeois moderation, but a mean nonetheless between two opposing urges. One is the tendency to cling to imitative repetition, to obey blindly the ancestral burden of taboos and ancient customs. The other is the exploratory excitement of social novelty. A mature culture allows for change, individual and collective, in all things. Rigidity or rashness are the twin dangers it must avoid. An open society, in short, tolerates only that conformity of belief and action proved indispensable for its survival. Conformity as such is not necessarily pernicious; in one sense it is obviously necessary. But conformity considered as the extension of order beyond necessity usually turns out to mean regimentation for the convenience of the dominant groups in a society. The rationalizations a society uses to justify conformity not shown to be essential (“We have always done things this way,” or “Unorthodox ideas are dangerous,”) represent so many obstacles to possible social improvements.
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The contemporary school is probably too closely integrated with its society’s interest groups to controvert them substantially. Yet if educational institutions are best to serve society’s enduring needs, they must teach children to realize that received notions have to be questioned. The process of learning that all beliefs may not be warranted is a necessary one if people are to grow in their ability to tolerate differences in outlook and behavior. Individual growth depends on challenging established ways and on seeking new alternatives. The school’s commitment to preserve uncritically established ideas as the only ones tolerable has to be minimized. At one level, this implies that educators adopt the following operational criterion for judging their behavior: Is this rule or imposition of order essential to my educational work? (One wonders how student dress codes, for example, might fare if this standard were universally applied.) At another level, curricula ought to free the individual from the tyranny of the group. Young people must be exposed freely to the ideas of other groups, systems, nations and epochs. The individual has to be brought to an awareness of his own individuality rather than his commonality. Moral autonomy, personal excellence, education for diversity – these have to become the paramount goals of education in a free society. Not education for “trained manpower” or for society’s need, but education for individual creativity and independence. Children can be induced into the culture, given a basis of common experience and knowledge essential for civilized life, without utterly suppressing their initiative or destroying their capacity to be productively different.
The alternative is a return to the closed society. The tragedy of conformity in modern education is that it is unnecessary. One can appreciate the limitations of primitive education because the conditions dictating its objectives are inherently repressive. This is not true in an industrial-bureaucratic society. Its members are fortunate enough to be able to experiment with a wide range of goals without fear of having their culture torn asunder. The unrealized potential of institutionalized enculturation consists in the exploration of this variety of educational values.
