HISTORY PERSON (very fast; very confident. think horrible Histories BBC host)
An abridged history of education.
We come down from the trees. We look up. We see the moon: we go- "what the hell is that thing" and we start questioning "why". What is this? Why is this? Why is that? And that is the beginning of education for us humans. We start but we don't get far. Because we are hungry. Thirsty. Rain is pouring on our heads, and animals are eating us. We don't have time to ponder the moon; so we forget about it until we figure out how to get together in communities and we protect each other and we fend for each other. Only then, do we look back up at the moon and we ask again, and we remember "why". We asked WHY.
We start to write. Discover it. Create it. We write to communicate ideas. Questions. We write the code of Hammurabi: we write the beginnings of laws. And it's good. Except for the fact that it's not if you aren't a king, or an aristocrat or if you're rich. Otherwise you are still trying to fight the animals, and stop the rain, and quench your thirst and find your food.
And times passes. Passes without being missed: passes until 500 BC.
The Greeks finally have enough of a structure where they figure out that people can take the time to educate themselves. Plato discovers that he start academies in Greece. That he can have disciples. He discovers that we can ask questions. We discover mathematics. Arithmetic. Philosophy. We start to discover the stars. Astronomy. WE discover the universe outside our front door.
But then catastrophe ensues!
The library of Alexandria, THE library of the world: the cradle of our books and knowledge of all that math and science and life that we loved--- burns to the ground. We forget. We forget about everything. We forget and we start to fight each other: and the dark ages sweep over us and blacks out all of our questions. It erases all of our progress. Destroys all the knowledge that we accumulated from the recess corners of our minds. That knowledge goes into hiding. It becomes concealed in convents and masked in monasteries. Monks are copying what little we have left by hand: person to person: generation to generation: yet nobody is allowed to read it. Nobody knows anything. We forget that the blood flows. We forget that the earth revolves around the sun. We forget about the bones in our body; how to do surgeries on our brains; how to write and read. But then all of a sudden we remember: we may have forgotten everything, but we never forgot how to learn.
This is how the renaissance happens.
We all breathe a collective sigh. And then we get to work.
We start to institute universities. For the first time, we start to loosen the grip on education. We stop being so strict about who can and cannot learn. It's not only the rich; now it is only the people that WANT to be intellectuals. They can go to the universities (if a rich person sponsored you) and we can learn things and we can communicate with each other. And that is what we do.
In France, Rousseau starts speaking up: he says that the only way to educate people to go farther as a species is to educate everybody.
And finally, FINALLY, in 1635, along comes Horace Mann and John Dewy: not together but separately as amazing: they somehow both think up the great idea of: public education. Of course Dewy would get credited as the "father of modern education"--- but Mann is truly "the man" here-- he states that "Education is our only political safety. Outside of that ark all is deluge.That If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education". He states that education is a RIGHT for EVERYBODY(* "everybody"). Children should not be in the work force, they should not be toiling the fields, they should not be trying to survive: that they are not animals of burden. They are actually brains, Beings, that are growing, and that youth is the best time to give them all of the education that they can grown up to become citizens of the universe.
We decide: then and there that it is worth it. That our children are worth it. And it becomes a right.
And later it becomes a right for all genders, all races, all people of all kinds.
And that brings us to now.
That brings us to this moment: to this sentence.
It brings us to our porches, to our yards:
we are still starring at that moon.
And we are still---- always and forever: asking "why".
And that is education.
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