T-Bird Anni Rides Again

There is a post that has gone round some of the HE yahoo groups about how the mass school system was developed - the original article is here if you have been lucky enough not to read it yet but feel the need for a bit of not so light (or unbiased) reading on a Saturday night. Now, this got me thinking a bit, I mean, this is the time period I’m studying for the year with the OU so I have a few vague notions about the history of society at the time and even of the education system of the time within the UK (cos that’s the unit I’m reading this week….)

So let’s get it straight.  This bloke over in Prussia did not invent mass education.  His system is not the only educational system round the world that was in use at the time he was throwing tantrums about how his professionally trained soldiers had been whupped by a load of French farmhands.  It may well still be partially recognised in the 3 tier German system of education (Hauptschul, Realschul and Gymnasium) and also in the German attitude to going to school OR ELSE…. which incidentally was a law introduced significantly later (I beleive it was some short bloke with a mustash and a similar attitude to Napoleon about world domination that passed that particular law but that isn’t covered by the course i’m doing so don’t quote me)  

Those French farmhands had seen warfare of a pretty bloody kind for a good while by the time they got to Prussia having had that whole French Revolution thing where everyone was expected to fight for the greater good (for greater good read whatever Robspierre et al decided was the Rights of Man as Citizen that week) or get their head removed from the rest of them.  That tends to concentrate the mind of a soldier you know.  As does knowing that your Leader is a shortarsed despotic if charismatic tyrant (who ordered all the sick and injured of his own army poisoned rather than transported back to France after one campaign)  But that’s just an aside to my rant (hey, it’s my rant and if I want to go off on tangents I will   )

The article was written by an American about the American school system as he saw it.  As far as I am aware  the bloke who went and looked at the Prussian system started the mass American school system didn’t come over to the UK and start ours.  In fact I’d go as far as to say we weren’t on good relations with those darned Yankees at that point what with them just having done that big tea party over at Boston and all that.  So i’m not entirely sure what relevence bandying this round has for UK home edders but that’s not really the point, the point is that the reason the Prussian system was so awful (and the German system is still pretty awful) was that children’s parents were threatened with death or their children being taken away if they did not comply.  As far as I am aware that is niether the case on this side or the other side of the Atlantic.  As far as I am aware it never has been the case although I know there are a few LEA types who would like it to be so.  All mass education systems have to have some form of compliance built in, they don’t work unless everyone sits down, shuts up and does as they are told.  I know that in some of hte "alternative" types of school system ther is a lot more freedom and creativity but even in those there are rules and manners.  One does not disrupt another child’s work in a Montessori classroom, it is not polite - that "will" is "imposed" upon the children, the children are "trained" to be considerate (and no, I’m not saying that’s bad, just pointing out that it’s a form of compliance to a set of expected ideals)

So I get to my point (I think!)  The school system has an awful lot of flaws, some may not be as aparent to those who "use" the system as they are to those of us who have looked into althernatives.  As home educators we have chosen to withdraw from that system and go a different way.  I don’t think that gives us the right to compare the system to something designed to impose by fear an unthinking obedience to The State any more than we have the right to say "they don’t home educate my way so they are doing it wrong".  Because if the British school system was run on the Prussian model, non of us WOULD be home educating because the education system would have done it’s job and turned us all into tremblingly obedient serfs willing to do anything our better educated leaders dictated including sending our children to school.  And I’ve no diea why this has got up my nose so much.  but it has and I can’t find my ranty blog anymore (I think they killed it cos I forgot to rant on it often enough) so I’ve ranted publically instead.