A College Education: The Endnotes

From the difference between 'college' and 'university' to the origin of kindergarten, some more details about the history of education.

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Today, some extra bits of information from my video about the word Education, & if you haven’t seen that yet, click on the card. In that video we discussed the word university & its etymology, from universitas magistrorum et scholarium “the union of masters & scholars”, but we didn’t discuss the word college, which can have different meanings in British & American English. From the Latin word colligere “to collect”, the Latin word collegium or its English derivative college could refer to various types of collective groups. In an academic context, the first colleges, such as at Oxford University, were constituent parts of university, & began as little more than endowed boarding houses for impoverished students, basically dormitories, though over time the colleges gained more autonomy within the the larger universities. Because some smaller institutions weren’t divided into constituent colleges, they would sometimes be referred to as colleges themselves, & today, in American English college & university are often used interchangeably. Now as we also saw in the main video, as attitudes shifted after the middle ages, the emphasis shifted back to an education that emphasized human affairs with the neo-classical era. Furthermore with the Protestant Reformation & its break from the Catholic Church, Protestant schools no longer taught Latin as a matter of course, as in the 16th century vernacular schools in Germany, & later the new schools popping up in the United States, which conducted a more practical education. While the first university founded in the US, Harvard, established in 1636, was a traditional liberal arts university, in the 18th century Benjamin Franklin founded the Academy & College of Philadelphia which had a practical curriculum & Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia which promoted secularism & science. & indeed with the rise of capitalism we see more of a focus on general skills & vocational education, with science becoming more & more popular in the 19th century & beyond. The ideal citizens that were being produced by these new educational systems were productive economic units. The Americans followed German educational practises not only in terms of teaching in the vernacular languages, but also in terms of progressive educational reforms. For instance there was Herbartianism, named after German philosopher, psychologist, & pedagogue Johann Friedrich Herbart, which emphasized the importance of individual development to societal contribution, & divided the learning process into the discrete steps of preparation, presentation, association, generalization, & application. In fact it was perhaps the enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who first pointed out the importance of understanding how children learn to the process of pedagogy. Rousseau’s writings were influential on the Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi & his student German Friedrich Fröbel who stressed that children have unique needs & capabilities. These developments seem obvious now, but they were highly innovative in their day. Fröbel’s most lasting contribution to education is the invention of kindergarten—meaning literally ‘child garden’, from the German. Kindergarten made its way to the US when one of Fröbel’s students Margarethe Schurz opened a German-language kindergarten in Watertown, Wisconsin in 1856, inspiring American educator Elizabeth Peabody to open the first English-language one in 1860, & the idea spread. & since we began this video by pointing out the difference between British & American English usage, here too we see a divide, as North American kindergarten is typically called nursery schools in the UK.