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Essay on History and Process of Educational Innovations
At some point specialist educators appeared in different communities. In tribes this may have been associated with the role of elders. In ancient Greece we know that people had 'jobs' as specialist educators. For example, Achilles had a tutor, Phoenix, who had the task of teaching him to be 'both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds'. Some centuries later, in Athenian society, there were schools (perhaps based on earlier Babylonian models), and there were both teachers and pedagogues.
In Britain, it can be argued that the first adult educators were the missionaries who came from Ireland or from continental Europe. The church became and remained for many centuries, 'the greatest educational force in the country'.The clergy had a duty to teach. This they did through preaching, talking with people as they went about their lives, and through more specialized means such as schooling. However, it is with the beginnings of religious non-conformity and the work of people such as John Wycliffe that we see a major shift. Rather than look to the priests around matters of faith, Wycliffe believed that we must look directly to the Bible. For this to happen people - all 'classes of people', not just the rich or privileged, had to learn to read. From the late 1370s, 'Poor Preachers' started to spread the gospel around Britain.
Elisabeth Irwin (1880-1942), the founder of the Little Red School House, was a remarkable and influential educator who did much to transform American education in the early part of the twentieth century. Along with such contemporaries as John Dewey, Caroline Pratt, founder of the City and Country School, and Lucy Sprague Mitchell, founder of the Bank Street School, Irwin introduced pedagogical innovations that were revolutionary in their time. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a time when school meant students sitting silently............
