Classical Education

Grand Tour

In the late 17th and early 18th century the young men of the nobility were taught to read the works of ancient Greek and Roman authors as part of their education. A "classical education" often involved learning to read and write and speak both ancient languages. You weren't considered educated among the aristocracy if you couldn't do that.

Classical Education 

They felt that their learning set them apart from the uneducated peasants and demonstrated their natural superiority, that they were placed in command because it was simply the natural order of things. No longer was their place above us ordained by God, they had to believe that they were naturally better qualified because of their superior intelligence. Part of what made those Enlightenment and proto-Enlightenment thinkers gravitate to the works of ancient Rome and Greece was the idea of empire, and that they were the heirs and descendants of those empires. They had been passed that torch by the philosophers and statesmen of the Romans.

Grand Tour

Once an aristocratic son had reached the age of maturity and was ready to take on the family business, so to speak, they were sent on a "grand tour" of Europe. Since they fancied themselves as much heirs of the Renaissance as heirs of ancient Greece and Rome, they went to Greece and Italy to pick through the ruins for anything that might reinforce this idea of themselves. This led to the development later of the field of archaeology. It also led to the young aristocrats stealing a lot of ancient heritage and taking it back to England. For example, the Parthenon frieze known as the "Elgin Marbles" which have yet to be returned to Greece. 

Stolen Antiquities of the Grand Tour Era

Educational Segregation

If their children were to receive their inheritance, they should be made to understand what they were inheriting and how they were a breed apart from the general population. The movement for classical education began with private tutors and governesses who instilled the correct ideas and information in the young aristocrats, and later there were private boarding schools where they would be a captive audience separated from the common children to learn their place at the head of society. It was as much indoctrination as it was education. It combined the two concepts into class education.

Toffs and Toughs

This served to emphasize the class difference by having two different systems of education, one for the rich and another for the poor. For both it was to teach them their place in society as much as it was to give them an education. This was echoed in America's segregated schools, which gave a better education to white children while giving non-white children the scraps of an education. It wouldn't do for "them" to become more educated than "us". What if it undermines the established order of things and shows class to be a meaningless distinction? What if the wealthy are not actually intellectually superior, they just get a better education? What if race is a meaningless distinction as well? It wasn't to be considered. First we segregated education by class, and then by sex and then by race.

Indoctrination of Values

Early Public Education

After the Enlightenment there were some thinkers who were moved to attempt to do something about human misery and ignorance by making education universally available to poor children. Even in this beginning they limited the education they gave to poor children to what they would need to be factory workers and office workers for the Industrial Revolution. In reality they were basically retooling humanity to make the shift from an agrarian society to an industrialized one. In order to provide workers fit for this sort of work they had to raise the level of education and teach them to read a little and do some basic mathematics. 

Better still, institutions to educate children could be used to mold their minds and ideas to the desired specifications. The Catholic church and especially the Jesuits had known this for some time. 

Society of Jesus

Conflict Theory

The proponents of public education at the time were inspired by the Jesuit example and saw that education could be used to uniformly instill the correct set of values in young people who hadn't learned how to think critically yet. Children believe what adults in authority tell them. Tell children what to believe in their formative years and they will carry those beliefs often for the rest of their lives. Public school was used to enforce hierarchies and promote official narratives of things like history and the order of society. It also often served to make learning as unpleasant as possible to discourage children from doing it when nobody was making them. Children who did that were generally picked on for wanting to know more than they were being taught.

Sociology of Education

According to Marx, education was being used as a tool to maintain the power structure. It was the reason for educational segregation between classes and races. If poor children received the same education as the children of the ruling class and turned out to be as intelligent as they were, it would undermine the power structure by de-legitimizing the ruling class' claims of intellectual superiority. This attitude is seen as early as the 17th century when the learned heads of the aristocracy claimed that certain books should not be read by peasants on the grounds that peasants didn't have the mental capacity or the educational foundation to understand what they had read. If they never got to read the books, the theory never had to be put to the test. This idea in its turn came from the early attitudes of the church before the bible was translated. Peasants shouldn't be allowed to read the bible for themselves and thus the bible and church services were presented in Latin and interpreted for the peasants by the clergy so that they couldn't derive their own meaning, which might be different from the official church stance.

Pledge of Allegiance

Public education was informed by these attitudes and by other motivations like instilling the idea of social hierarchy and supplying the needs of business by educating workers only to the level required by employers. In America they took this further by using schools to inculcate a sense of patriotism in children. The idea originated, ironically, with a socialist minister named Francis Bellamy He was a flag salesman. Until he started going around to schools, only government buildings had flags on them. Bellamy wanted to sell more flags. He wrote the pledge and used it to sell flags to schools to teach children patriotism. The idea spread and soon every classroom had a flag and children were made to stand and salute it every morning while reciting the pledge. Patriotism had made its way into the curriculum. Bellamy had been a socialist, but he had planted the seeds of nationalism in American schools. Later in the 1950's  the words "under God" were added to the pledge.  There were Supreme Court challenges as early as the 1940's because saluting the flag had become more or less mandatory. The Supreme Court ruled that making the pledge and salute of the flag mandatory was inconsistent with the idea of a free country. That notwithstanding, there are many people today who still believe it should be mandatory, hence the Colin Kapaernick controversy. It also explains the American practice of "flag worship", because we were taught to do that as soon as we entered school and had it drummed into us that love of God and patriotism were closely related during 12 years of education.

Colin Kaepernick Blacklisted Over Refusal To Salute Flag