Welcome to the Endnotes, where I put all the fun facts I can’t fit into the main videos!
Today, some extra bits of information from my video about the word Education — and
if you haven’t seen that yet, click on the card.
In that video we discussed the word university and its etymology, from universitas magistrorum
et scholarium “the union of masters and scholars”, but we didn’t discuss the word
college, which can have different meanings in British and 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, and 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, and today, in American English college and
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 and 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, and 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 and
College of Philadelphia which had a practical curriculum and Thomas Jefferson founded the
University of Virginia which promoted secularism and science.
And indeed with the rise of capitalism we see more of a focus on general skills and
vocational education, with science becoming more and more popular in the 19th century
and 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, and
pedagogue Johann Friedrich Herbart, which emphasized the importance of individual development
to societal contribution, and divided the learning process into the discrete steps of
preparation, presentation, association, generalization, and 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
and his student German Friedrich Fröbel who stressed that children have unique needs and
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, and the idea spread.
And since we began this video by pointing out the difference between British and American
English usage, here too we see a divide, as North American kindergarten is typically called
nursery schools in the UK.
As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a
wide range of fascinating people, on the Endless Knot Podcast, available on all the major podcast
platforms as well as our other YouTube channel.
Thanks for watching!