© Damon Winter/The New York Times
In the first of these two articles, I showed paintings illustrating school life from the early seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, a period of more than two centuries when few artists painted the inside of the classroom. This changed from 1850, although the theme still failed to attract the best-known painters.
Albert Anker, father of Swiss painting and known for his large output of ‘genre scenes’, probably painted more classrooms than any other. He painted The Village School in 1848 nearly half a century afterwards, in 1896, presumably from his own recollection of his final year at school in Neuchâtel. Compared to earlier paintings, this classroom is packed, relatively orderly, and well-equipped with benches and desks, even though the children are shabbily dressed, indicating their poverty.
Anker’s earlier painting of The School Exam from 1862 shows a more contemporary scene. It’s not clear whether the pupils are undergoing examination, or the school is. Three of them seen standing out at the front are so poor that they cannot afford shoes at all, but effort is at last being put into their education.
Winslow Homer is perhaps the most famous painter to have made more than one work showing The Country School, believed to be of a country schoolroom in the Catskills, New England. This painting, dated 1871, is the first of a series of three or more showing the same largely empty classroom, with its impossibly wide age range. Two of the boys reading to the teacher are too poor for shoes, although the girls on the right look much better-dressed.
Following the collapse of the Second Empire during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the Third Republic targeted education for special development. Schools in France had earlier been largely run by the Catholic Church, but from 1833 communes had been required to provide schools for boys but not girls. The anti-clerical Minister for Public Instruction, Jules Ferry, introduced laws in 1881 to establish free education throughout the country, even for girls, and progressively replaced existing Catholic schools with the modern Republican School through the 1880s.
François Bonvin’s The Scholar of 1874 is one of a few paintings showing individual pupils in the classroom. This boy has been granted the privilege of his own desk, at the front of the class, and is working on after the end of the school day. The teacher’s hat and coat are draped over his desk, ready for when this pupil completes his extra work.
Jean-Baptiste Jules Trayer’s wonderful watercolour of A Breton Infants School from 1882 predates any celebration of the Republican policy: the crucifix high on the wall at the right shows that this is one of the older Catholic schools. It shows a teacher helping one of her students with writing, in a class entirely wearing traditional Breton costume. There’s clearly room for improvement, though, as one girl is sleeping on her book, doubtless exhausted from her early morning work on the family farm.
Rising standards of schooling were also reaching out to some of the more remote communities in Nordic countries. Oscar Björck’s painting of Madam Henriksen’s School for Girls in Skagen from 1884 shows a tiny and personal class in this small, isolated community at the northern tip of Jylland (Jutland), home to a major artists’ colony and birthplace of Danish Impressionism.
Then, in the mid 1880s, something remarkable happens to paintings of the schoolroom in France: they become strikingly photographic in their reality, with the advent of Naturalism.
Within two years of the early death of Jules Bastien-Lepage, Paul Louis Martin des Amoignes’ In the Classroom (1886) looks as if it may have been painted from photographs. One boy, staring intently at the teacher in front of the class, is caught crisply, pencil poised in his hand. Beyond him the crowd of heads becomes more blurred.
Jean Geoffroy’s Primary School Class from 1889 doesn’t give us the same depth of field effect, but shows one of the Republic’s new lay teachers working diligently in the classroom with her pupils. They’re still a bit of a shower, with the younger ones at the back working on traditional slates, but this is the public face of the modern Republican School.
In Geoffroy’s In School from about 1900, another lay teacher in a modern Republican infants class is caring for the French men and women of the future.
Of course France wasn’t the only country to be improving its educational system at this time. Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky’s Mental Arithmetic. In Public School of S. A. Rachinsky from 1895 shows a class of poor students in the village of Tatev in Smolensk province, at the western edge of the Russian Empire in central eastern Europe. They were fortunate enough to have a pioneering educator as their local teacher.
Sergey Rachinsky had been a professor of botany in Moscow until 1867, when he abandoned academic life to run the village school in Tatev. The elderly professor is seen with his students working on a challenging mental arithmetic problem. The teacher died in 1902.
My final painting, by the Ukrainian artist Max Silbert, shows a Singing Lesson in a School in Holland in 1907, and is a fascinating chance discovery. Although its realism isn’t as detailed or photographic as the French paintings from the 1880s above, it shows a similar photographic depth of field effect. The pupils closest to the artist are shown in sharp focus, and those in the further distance are markedly blurred. It’s impossible to tell whether this results from Silbert painting this work from photographs with the same blurring, or it was a deliberate effect introduced by the artist to give it a photographic look.
As the calendar passes into September, it’s time for the summer holidays to end and for children and older students to return to their schools and colleges. This weekend I mark that with depictions of what has really been going on in our educational establishments. Although this hasn’t been a theme for more major artists, these paintings appear disarmingly honest, and should reassure you of the great improvements achieved in recent times.
Isaac van Ostade lived only briefly between 1621–1649, so I suspect this painting of a Village School from his circle was probably made by about 1650, possibly earlier. Although it has seen better days, it shows a schoolmaster at the right supervising a group with a wide age range, all in various levels of poverty, and in primitive stages of education. The classroom itself is almost bare of furniture, with most of the children sitting or squatting on the floor.
Later in the seventeenth century, Jan Steen’s The Village School (c 1665) shows one reason for the apparent unpopularity of school as a motif: physical punishment. The child at the right holds out a hand for teacher to strike it with a wooden spoon, presumably in return for the screwed-up piece of paper on the floor. The children here are better-dressed, and the room better-furnished. One boy at the far right is writing intently, and another, his face almost covered by the brim of his hat, is reading a book.
A few years later, Steen painted a scene in a larger and more chaotic classroom, in The Village School from about 1670. Although there are two staff sat at the teachers’ desk, the man is distracted, perhaps in cutting himself a fresh quill. The woman teacher sat next to him is engaged in explaining something to a pupil.
Around them, all hell is breaking loose. In the distance, a boy is stood on one of the trestle tables. Older children are teaching younger ones, and a small group at a table at the right are trying to write while others get up to mischief. One younger child in the middle of the foreground has fallen asleep against a hat.
In those early schools, boys and girls were not segregated, but enjoyed equally derelict schooling. By the middle of the eighteenth century, in larger schools at least, it became more common for the genders to be taught in separate classes or even different schools.
Boys’ School is a copy of an original painting by Jan Josef Horemans the Younger from the middle of the eighteenth century. Its schoolmaster looks to be the only figure sat at a desk, and is engaged with a couple of the older boys, while the rest of the class catches up with their social lives. A few writing tablets are visible, as are scraps of paper, but the only real books seem to be those well out of reach, above the schoolmaster’s head.
Its sister painting showing a Girls’ School is more peaceful and purposeful, but seems intended to trap young women in their narrow social role. Although one girl is reading, others are engaged in fibrecraft or dressmaking, or apparently learning how to make a brush from a bundle of twigs. More academic learning was only really possible in richer homes, under exceptional private tutors.
Francisco Goya’s With Pain Comes Gain. School Scene from 1780-85 is small and quite Hogarthian in its depiction of corporal punishment in a school. The teacher raises a whip to strike the bare buttocks of one of a succession of pupils, as the more studious continue at their work seemingly disinterested in the suffering of their comrades. Goya is one of the few masters to have painted series of children at play.
In towns and cities, there was greater economic drive for children to work throughout the year, and to obtain a better education. These seem to have taken some schools, at least, to operate well into the evening, as George Gillis Haanen shows in his beautifully lit Night School from 1835. The schoolmaster, ensconced at his elevated desk, does at least look more academic, and there are slates for writing and children reading books.
The nineteenth century also brought the concept of self-improvement, and a growing desire among many of the working and middle classes to better themselves by education, to improve their income and family prospects, also among a growing minority of girls.
Changes remained slower in the country, as seen in this undated painting by one of Eduard Ritter’s circle, of Brave Girls, Bad Boys, School Class in Tyrol, probably from between 1835-1849, the reign of Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria shown in one of its portraits. The children are enjoying a rich range of fruit, and there’s no shortage of paper, even if some of it is being used to make hats rather than for writing. Its elderly schoolmaster looks delightfully benign, and the stem on his smoking pipe is the longest I have seen.
Schools in Europe had arisen to meet the need for clergy and to support the church; those in other cultures were no different, as shown in John Frederick Lewis’s undated watercolour of an Arab School, probably from around 1850. This is what is more properly known as a maktab, providing general schooling between the ages of 6-14, following which children specialise more in their subjects prior to going on to higher education at a madrasah.
Thomas Faed’s paintings have faded from view since it was claimed that he did for Scottish painting what Robert Burns did for Scottish song. His Visit to the Village School from 1852 shows an elderly couple listening to some young children reading, as the schoolmaster is trying to impress his visitors. Older children, though, are not being quite so obliging, and stood against the wall at the far left is a pupil wearing a dunce’s hat in shame.
Scotland, for all the difficulties posed by its far-flung rural and island populations, was in the vanguard of introducing free public schooling: in 1561 the Church of Scotland declared that every parish church should have its own teacher, and that education should be provided free to the poor; an act of the Scottish Parliament raised taxes for that purpose in 1633.
Thomas Brooks didn’t have the benefit of a Scottish education, and his painting of The New Pupil from 1854 clearly shows the more disorderly rabble in an English country school, as a mother introduces her reluctant son to his new class. Brooks’ eye for fine detail and the modern lightness in this work are leading up to what would later be termed Naturalism.
Charles Hunt’s Visit to the Schoolroom from 1859 returns to more traditional style, as a well-dressed mother appears taken aback by the antics going on behind the teacher, and extra-curricular activities include a girl who is about to snip a lock from a boy’s head. At the far right another dunce stands on a chair wearing the trademark conical hat.
Chinese culture places heavy value on one’s academic successes, stemming partly from the country’s long history around education, and this is one of the underlying factors that makes Gaokao (the college entrance exam) so notoriously difficult. Similar situations can be seen across different societies with affinities to Chinese culture. In South Korea, students are trapped in a lifetime of study and stress never ends. The Singaporean education system excels in global rankings but its students are struggling to cope under relentless pressure and stress. Seeing examples outside China, thus, it is hardly surprising that students in China from a young age has been pushed towards various types of tutoring or extracurricular classes, in order to better their grades or explore their ‘passion’.
What really ends up happening, is the even though these extracurricular activities might indeed help the child to explore their passion, more often than not, it is what the parent wants for themselves as a bragging right, rather than genuine care for their child. In China, face (roughly the equivalent of honor) is taken with the highest regard. For your child to stay behind in schools, in their education, combines the two all-important elements of face with academic successes, thus, not acceptable.
Do the tutoring classes and extracurricular classes such as piano lessons, and as a growing trend, competitions such as math competition, robotics competition etc., really benefit one’s overall education and life?
Let’s begin on exploring the impacts of extracurricular classes. There are many stories that an ethnic Chinese parent forces their child to do piano or violin lessons and the child ends up hating it, so I will not elaborate on those. Instead, let’s look at the competitions. A robotics competition aimed at teens and pre-teens that I went to recently went to is a perfect example of this. Do primary school students in the lower grade have the mental capacity to develop a program? Sure there are exceptions but for the majority of the population, no. Children around this age also often lack other crucial capacities such as having enough patience and determination to pursue a complex project thoroughly. One reason for this is because biologically, the human brain takes an awful amount of time to fully develop. Whatever benefits (when these benefits are actual and not just perceived) that these classes offer, even when retained later in life, are not always useful. What usually ends up happening, is that the children are fed knowledge, instructed by their teachers to perform tasks that often they themselves have no idea, no interest, in the task itself or the meaning behind it.
Now I sound like against all sorts of extracurricular classes and tutoring classes, but this is not the case. They do offer some benefits, at the very least many extracurricular activities are things a child would enjoy, tutoring classes can help a child understand knowledge that they were not able to grasp during school time. What is happening in China, however, is on . As most parents do not sign their children up for these classes as a result of them wanting their child to enjoy the classes or understand what they couldn’t in class, but rather a desire for their children to come up on top compared to others of the same age.
This fierce competition can sometimes lead to bizarre outcomes. This might have been a parody, but is not far stretched from the reality. The Chinese state television network has produced a documentary series on Gaokao that is also uploaded to YouTube, and you can have a more in-depth view of how pierce the competition is.
The true picture in China involves parents that are desperate to get their kids more ‘education’ in order to have a competitive edge, children often overloaded and tired, and the ‘educational agencies’ that are racking up in cash.
These agencies promise to teach your child knowledge, life skills and more. Of course all they want is some handsome amount of cash, but you would do everything for your child’s future, so you would pay for whatever that betters your child’s future, no matter how ridiculous the class sounds. All an agency need is a syllabus that involves words that the parents cannot understand, teachers working there that promises you that the knowledge that they are teaching there is invaluable for your child’s future, and if a foreign teacher (preferably white) is there, it would have been even better.
Thus, begins the enslavement.
You have become a slave that needs to pay those invoices sent by the ‘educational agency’, and your child has their time and childhood taken away from them. The slave master is not worried about a parent or two that decides to escape this slavery, there will almost certainly be more parents ready to sign the voluntary slavery contract.
Chinese parents believe that the ‘slavery’ is freedom, freedom for their children to choose in the future, but in reality, they hardly even have the freedom to not choose the option of voluntary slavery. From primary school and even kindergarten (and in Hong Kong, even before kindergarten), parents around you have been signing their kids’ childhood away form them in droves, and teachers are encouraging you to do so as well, with sayings such as ‘the summer vocation is the best time to catch up and surpass other students’ going around, how can you be so defiant of the system that is not beneficial to you?
After all, while your life is bound by endless responsibilities, your child is just starting out in life, and have an infinite number of possibilities and unlimited growth potential. How can someone be so cruel to not give them that tiny amount of money and rod your child of their infinitely bright future?
Shut up, and pay up.
With the pandemic, the world is shifting into a changing new reality that we are experiencing, and seeing in front of our eyes. One of the biggest change for me personally, is attending Zoom University.
My college is located in New York City, but I am currently residing in China. 16 hours of flight and 14 days of quarantine away from where my school is physically located. This is possible because of the transition to online classes only, meaning I only need internet connection (including some, illegal softwares, to get pass the Chinese internet censorship to access things like Gmail) to get my education.
Aside from not being limited to geographic location, I also save a ton of time. Many classes that I take are taught in an ‘asynchronous’ format, meaning that I get to learn on my own pace, and for me, that means much more efficiently. An accounting class that I am taking would have taken up 4 hours per week of class time if taught in person, in addition to homework assignments, but instead I get to only spend 1 hour for that class in total, and still managing an A. I wouldn’t have paid attention during class anyways, I am constantly on my laptop doing some other stuff, like coding, reading, or just researching on my own on certain topics that I happened to want to research on.
To me, school is not the same as education. In fact, schools can stand in way of my education, for example, a teacher took away a book I was reading during her class in middle school, hindering my education, because I understood everything in her class already. To most teachers, I have never been a good student, but that does not mean I am not a good learner.
I would never spend 80% of my effort to get an A, because to me, that is not cost efficient. I am much happier when spending 20% of the effort to get a B in a course, because that means I was much more efficient in my education. Instead of remembering every single detail needed to get an A in the exam, I get to have time to educate myself in other ways. By reading, by experiencing, by conferencing, by going to seminars.
The ‘education’ system believes in the superior quality of the knowledge acquired through it, because the system taught it in schools, and the system measured it through exams. This is evident on the non-acceptance of home schooling or other types of non-standard education, and also to students that study in different education systems, which often do not recognize some parts of their education (such as educational level, grades, courses taken etc.) taught in another education system, where some have to revert back a year or two when transferring between education systems that disagree with each other too much.
What these systems are for, how they are built and executed, however, is extremely backwards.
Imagine a single professor teaching the same course at different universities. Are the students in those universities getting vastly different education in regards to that course? No. Yet they can be paying vastly different tuition. There has been a joke that the only difference between students in expensive private colleges and public colleges nowadays is the tuition they pay, the Zoom is all the same.
If universities keep on issuing degrees and count coursework during online learning towards graduation, then what is the point in going back to in person teaching after the pandemic ends? It has been proven that online education works for a wide range of classes, why not keep it this way?
Instead of worrying about the seating plan for the students and whether a big lecture hall is needed to accommodate the extra students this year, all colleges need is to distribute laptops to every student. In fact, it might provide better education. A snow storm, traffic jams, even a pandemic, cannot stop a virtual classroom from functioning.
Schools nowadays act more as gateways to get to the next step instead of providing meaningful education. If you are presented with a choice of obtaining the same education at half the prize as you would in undergraduate studies, but you would not be issued with a degree, most people would not have taken that offer.
That offer has always been possible, because of the internet, and consequently, mass availability of knowledge. Colleges existed because only the intellectuals had access to knowledge, and they were made professors that teach their students knowledge otherwise unavailable. Some knowledge still exists only in the heads of the few, but most knowledge can be found using a simple Google search available to everyone with access to the world wide web.
The reason why people seek to attend prestigious institutions is because those institutions are prestigious, that give out degrees branded with the highly sough after names. Does the employer care what courses or what professors that you said ‘attracted you’ to that specific university? The courses taught at those institutions have no content that is otherwise inaccessible, what is otherwise inaccessible, is the resources and social circle. That is the reason those institutions are highly sought after, and learning of knowledge comes as an after thought.
Memorable speeches on TEDx were memorable because of their content, regardless whether you listened to it in person or watched it on YouTube. Your favorite music do not suddenly become unattractive when you get out of the concert. So why does acquiring knowledge have to be any different? It is not like the quality of the knowledge is always better when you acquire it through the formal system, countless college graduates fail at their new jobs because lack of work experience, but somehow they are considered (and paid) more highly in many cases than someone who started working and gaining experience earlier but did not attend college.
Is college an investment in education? No, because those knowledge are taught for free on the internet. Are grades a reliable measure of your understanding in a certain topic? No, just because it is the only quantifiable data out there does not mean it is good data or grade inflation would not have been a thing.
But will the system stay?
Yes, because it is too big, and people are too committed, from companies who hire the people who went through the system to students paying tuition and taking on debts, as their commitment fee towards the system.
Such a big system is reluctant to change, as it refused to in the past. The basic teaching methods have remained largely the same for hundreds of years. Students are still learning in much of the same format, despite the advancement of nearly everything else.
An arbitrary syllabus teaching knowledge in an arbitrary pace that some arbitrary person deemed suitable for that particular course, in order to allow for some arbitrary evaluating method to come up with an arbitrary value, that will be forever printed on a certain piece of paper called a transcript, then transformed in an arbitrary way into another piece of paper called the degree, that somehow confirms your understanding and the school’s endorsement attesting to that fact, however arbitrary it is.
And yet this system is one of life’s most certain certainties.
How arbitrary.
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