I'm Mr. Beat
I went to school for 22 years.
And, at some point, you probably went to school, too, probably not for that long, but still.
As matter of fact, you may be watching this in SCHOOL RIGHT NOW
That’s trippy, dude.
Anyway, why do we have to go to school?
I mean, you may not like it, right?
So why, in nearly every country, are children forced to go to school?
In this video, I will explain why we have to go to school and look at how long this “school” thing has been going on.
In the beginning
(clears throat)
In the beginning, for hundreds of thousands of years, we didn’t go to school.
During the hunter gatherer days, when humans just gathered wild plants or chased wild animals, that’s pretty much the main thing we did, and we learned it at a very young age.
At that time, children learned to be good members of their tribe, or clan.
Wait, you said “learned.” How can people “learn” outside of school?
Silly Rabbit, most learning takes place outside of school.
I am not a rabbit.
Anyway, back then, children learned through play and exploration.
They didn’t need to read and write. They talked and listened to learn.
Around 3500 BCE, civilizations around the world began to develop writing systems, making it easier to teach others stuff so they would, what’s the word, uh...forget?
Yeah, forget. (I should write that down)
Formal schools, usually revolving around some kind of written language, popped up in places like ancient Greece, ancient India, ancient China, and ancient Rome.
Ancient...yeah, they're all ancient.
But usually only certain people had access to these schools, and those were the Three Rs:
The Rich, The Religious Leaders, and The Royalty.
Other than that, you pretty much just starting working when you were three, and worked your butt off until you died a few years later.
There were exceptions, of course.
In the city-states of ancient Greece, anyone could open a school, and even the poor could sometimes afford to send their sons to school.
Notice how I said “sons.”
Yeah, girls rarely went to school. And the schools were not mandated by the government.
It was voluntary, although a dude named (sing) Plato, kind of a big deal, first popularized the idea of making education mandatory in his book the Republic.
The first universities popped up during the early Middle Ages.
Students there studied and specialized in one thing.
Usually the arts, law, medicine, and of course, theology.
It was during this time that the University of Baloney
Wait, it’s not baloney? Well it should be. Okay, the University of Bologna
was established.
That university, in modern day Italy, was founded in 1088 and still exists, still kicking butt today.
But that ain’t got nothing on The University of al-Qarawiyyin, which opened in 859
It’s the oldest existing educational institution in the world and it’s also still kicking butt today.
In Europe, most universities, and schools, for that matter, were Christian.
In 1179, the Catholic Church gave free education for the poor.
Well I mean, poor boys, not girls.
Universities would spread throughout the entire world during the Middle Ages.
Still, it was Plato's idea of mandatory education that slowly started to gain momentum.
The most important leader of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, called for mandatory education.
Across the ocean, in modern day Mexico, the Aztecs already had mandatory education for every child.
While the poor there did not go to the same schools as the rich, they still had the opportunity.
And girls could go to school, too.
The first country to kind of do this in Europe was Scotland.
Its government passed the School Establishment Act 1616, in 1616, which forced all kids there to go to public, church-supervised, schools.
During a period known as the Enlightenment, schools all of sudden were cool.
One person I should probably mention from this time was (sing) John Amos Comenius.
Comenius, who came to prominence in the 1600s in central Europe, promoted the ideas that everyone deserved an education, regardless of how much money they had.
This included women.
He also looked for ways to make instruction more universal and practical.
The New England colonies in North America were ahead of the curve regarding public education.
Sure, public schools, schools for everyone in a society and also paid for by everyone in that society, had existed here and there before, but in New England in the 1600s they were all over the place.
The first taxpayer supported public school, the Mather School, opened in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1639.
In 1647, Massachusetts passed a law basically forcing most kids to go to school in their colony.
In the 1760s, Catherine the Great, the leader of Russia, appointed a dude named Ivan Betskoy as educational advisor.
Betskoy’s idea was to educate all young Russians, regardless of gender, in state schools, arguing that a general education, instead of just a specialized one, would make the nation stronger.
In 1763, a country that doesn’t exist anymore but where many of my ancestors came from, Prussia, forced all its kids to go to school.
Its leaders mainly did this to make the country more powerful and united, and their system ended up being incredibly influential.
In 1773, Poland created a Commission of National Education, made education more accessible to a wider group of people, and it also put much less emphasis on religion and more on Enlightenment ideals.
In 1775, Maria Theresa, the leader of Austria, required all boys and girls, ages 6 to 12 to go to school.
Entering the 1800s, however, it’s really important to note that school was still extremely rare.
I just mentioned the places around the world that pushed for it, but they were the exception to the rule.
In the early 1800s, most kids everywhere just went to work, not to school.
And that was just 200 years ago, kids.
While mandatory education gained momentum in Europe during this time, the United States was where the most dramatic reforms took place.
Before these reforms, many schools that existed there were in one-room schoolhouses, with kids of all ages gathered there.
Most people were not attracted to teaching kids at this time, so those who did teach were often unqualified.
ocal school boards hired teachers, and basically just cared about saving money
which is why they usually hired women, because they knew they could get away with paying women less.
Soon, though, normal schools began to become more common.
Steven: Oh! Normal! Like normal, average schools.
No Steven. Normal schools are what they used to call teacher training colleges. Now we call them teachers’ colleges.
Today we just call them teachers' colleges.
Teachers’ colleges made the job a profession, and they also helped schools become more alike no matter where you went.
Kids, of all the people to blame for why you go to school, blame (sing) Horace Mann the most.
Horace Mann was a major fan of public education.
He probably did more than any other person to convince people that education was a right, and it should be free.
He argued it would make society stronger by turning everyone into smarter, more productive, and disciplined citizens.
Take a guess where Mann was from.
Woah, good guess.
You must have went to school!
Yes, he was from Massachusetts
In 1852, Massachusetts became the first state in the country to pass a law forcing all kids to go to school.
Thanks to people like Mann, the state modeled its school system after the Prussian school system.
The last state in the United States to pass a law forcing all kids to go to school was Mississippi, in 1917.
Even after that, though, it wasn’t enforced too strictly until decades later.
By 1940, half of all young Americans had a high school diploma.
In the second half of the 1800s, mandatory school caught on around the world, first in Europe, North America, and Australia, then spreading to Asia and South America.
Why?
Well, nationalism for starters.
Countries wanted to unite their citizens culturally.
But progressive idealists also helped schools spread.
They wanted to get children out of the horrible working conditions in factories and into more advanced careers where they could make more money.
As industry rose and the need for farm labor decreased, it just made more sense for kids to go to school to have an upper hand.
The influential ideas of people like (sing) John Dewey helped further popularize schools.
Oh, and the idea that you didn’t have to go to a state school-you could go to a private school or homeschool-also helped the idea catch on.
The continent of Africa was the last to the school party, and today still is trying to catch up.
Even today, 13% of African children do not attend school.
Still, more kids are in school today around the world than ever before.
While some may not enforce it, nearly every country currently has some form of mandatory and mostly free education.
Ok, well everyone has to pay taxes to pay for those schools, but you know what I mean...
How long students have to go to school varies from country to country.
For example, in Uruguay, kids have to go to school between the ages of 6 and 14.
In Argentina, Uruguay’s neighbor to the south, they have to go to school between the ages of 6 and 18.
We can probably credit schools for the fact that 86 percent of the world can now read and write
and in the next thirty it will likely be close to 100 percent.
So that is why you have to go to school, kids.
You can blame Plato, or the Catholic Church, Massachusetts, or Prussia,
but ultimately you have to go to school because large institutions knew they would be more powerful if their members were well educated.
And also, countries knew they would be more united by forcing their young citizens to go to a place where they could indoctrinate them.
Today, staying in school usually means less stress and more money for you down the road.
so stay in school, kids.
Thank you for watching.
Thank you to my brother Steven for helping me make this.
And don't worry, I will be back next week with a new episode of Supreme Court Briefs.