Understanding Society
The Dawn of Civilization
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
John Wesley’s school rules allowed no time for play: children were to become pious followers, loyal soldiers, and hardworking citizens. Through Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, Doug follows education from the first cities and states into nineteenth-century national systems so standardized that, according to one historian, a French minister could claim to know which passage of Cicero every student was studying at 10:20 a.m.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
“For children, the dawn of civilization brought the yoke of mind-numbing farm labor, as well as the idea that children required raising, much like one would raise tomatoes. Because if children were born wicked you couldn’t leave them to their own devices. They first needed to acquire the veneer of civilization, and often this called for a firm hand. The notion that parents should ever strike a child originated only recently among our agrarian and and city-dwelling ancestors.
With the emergence of the first cities and and states came the first education systems. The church needed pious followers, the army loyal soldiers, and the government hard workers. Play was the enemy, all three agreed. ‘Neither do we allow any time for play,’dictated the English cleric John Wesley (1703-91) in the rules he established for his schools. ‘He that plays when he was a boy will play when he is a man.’
Not until the nineteenth century was a religious education supplanted by state systems in which in the words of one historian, ‘a French minister of education could boast that, as it was 10:20 a.m., he knew which passage of Cicero all students of a certain form throughout France would be studying. Good citizenship had to be drilled into people from an early age, and all citizens had to love their country. France, Italy and Germany had all been traced out on the map; now it was time to forge Frenchmen, Italians, and Germans.
During the Industrial Revolution, a large portion of manufacturing drudgery was relegated to machines. (Not everywhere, of course—in Bangladesh still work sewing machines to produce our bargains). That changed the aim of education. Now, children had to learn to read and write, to design and organize so they could pay their own way when they were adults.
Not until the late nineteenth century did children once again have more time to play. Historians call this period the ‘golden age’ of unstructured play, when child labor was banned and parents increasingly left kids to themselves. In many neighborhoods in Europe and North America no one even bothered to keep on eye on them, and kids simply roamed free most of the day.”